Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing.
No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.
Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this.
Until it changes, pirate everything.
Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).
So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?
In a world where distribution of a novel the size of War and Peace takes less than a one second download, there's no value beyond gatekeeping and exclusivity that publishers and platforms can provide, and those are arbitrary and artificially imposed, and entirely unnecessary.
Copyright is fundamentally a ceding of power by a society to individuals, granting them permission to claim sole ownership of their writings for a period of time, preventing other people and institutions from plagiarizing the work. We, society, cede the right to freely exchange information in deference to the creators of different media so they have the opportunity to profit from it.
The value of media is independent from the commercial activity which copyright protects. Someone attempting to claim authorship of public domain works might do it better, or maybe they make it worse.
There's no other purpose to copyright when the internet exists. We've seen nearly 4 decades of what this sort of system does; it allows those with lots of resources and lawyers to extort and exploit those without on technicalities and gotchas. It enriches and rewards middlemen assholes without concurrent return of value to society. It results in brainless reshashes and remakes and protected IP franchises into milquetoast formulaic omnislop. Any sort of actual creativity and variety gets suppressed or outcompeted or even legally squashed, even on the off chance that it might negatively impact sales. Books and films get destroyed as tax writeoffs. Artists get their music and writing and entire life work hoarded away by some massive multibillion dollar corporation, and sometimes even left to rot and fade away to dust, never to appear again.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Your idea of a copyright system has been tried, and it has failed. It's time to update to a system which works in the world which is.
But how much better would it be for creators if you gave those rapacious publishers the unconditional right to screw them over if they just wait 5 years (given production lead times)? You're taking away essentially the only lever creators have over some of the greediest capitalists imaginable, and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that's going to improve the lives of creators.
> Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity
Funny that you think I think this. No, I think the ideal copyright term is somewhere around 50 years. When you make it too short, you end up incentivizing publishers to screw over their creators as the copyright term will mostly be eaten up by the time it takes to produce something in the first place.
The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.
Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.
This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.
It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.
No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.
Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.
No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.
The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.
That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.
If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.
It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.
In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.
I especially like no-permission-needed for commercial use with predetermined royalties. Throw in patents and I'll be your best friend for life.
Another reform notion I heard (IIRC): Require formal renewal of copyrights. $10 fee per year to cover expenses. Allows Disney to keep their Tug Boat Willie and Mickey Mouse for as long as they like, without borking the rest of society.
My own reform idea: Royalty also paid to the government. For all IP, for all time. To enjoy our govt's subsidies, protection (tort), and adjudication (contracts), you gotta pay.
The aircraft carrier groups, diplomats, intelligence services, and lawyers needed to keep our markets open don't just pay for themselves.
Expect something similar when the next big author dies; my prediction: JK Rowling.
Notes:
0 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/505
1- https://hughstephensblog.net/2023/12/18/winnie-the-poohs-cop...
Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity.
An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard; but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption amount means that few estates pay any tax.
> Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party.
A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of an untimely death.
Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.
JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
/s
This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a negative signal.
We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something.
Or more simply: if you’re not selling it presently, you don’t get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights are solved, and we can all move on.
If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of that action.
CDs and streaming are just advertisements for the concerts.
The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
But they don’t?
Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding.
Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes.
People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case.
The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
Often the property is never found and returned.
It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention.
Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
We all get legal protections for our property.
Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written.
Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210
capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally. These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
Actually seems a bit weird to find a tax situation in the U.S that seems less beneficial to the person paying the tax than many other countries.
It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not.
In some countries taxes are annual.
In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.
In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..
(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us.
Fuck the copyright cartels.
There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.
Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.
These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?
What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected.
There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though.