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goku12 | on: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
kube-system | parent | next
The first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and 21 years for works already in production.

The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.

observationist | parent
This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically.

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.

Angostura | root | parent
The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted
observationist | root | parent
Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth.

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.

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