The major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first couple of years, and yet we extend copyright 70 years past the author's death! If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
" Since 1990, The Walt Disney Company had lobbied for copyright extension. The legislation delayed the entry into the public domain of the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, leading detractors to the nickname "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act".
In addition to Disney, California congresswoman Mary Bono (Sonny Bono's widow and Congressional successor), and the estate of composer George Gershwin supported the act. Mary Bono, speaking on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, said:
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
An excellent reminder that intelligence isn't a requirement to be a member of congress.
The requirement is money and connections
Drug patents are much more short-lived and there's arguably more money invested in drug discovery than in, say, writing a fiction novel. IMO copyright should be limited to 20-30 years. Not that LLM labs care anyway.
> Drug patents are much more short-lived
It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
However, the counterpoint can also be made that it should be extended, as the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions, with the short patent lifetime forcing pharma companies to command absurd prices just to recoup the R&D cost.
(IMHO: the system on how we research pharmaceuticals and how we fund it must be drastically reformed. The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free, it's already bad enough)
> The question is, how do we prevent China and India from just taking our research and copying it for free
centralize all chemistry research behind the closed doors, weapon-level export controls on U.S.-made fever drugs simply because they are U.S.-made, severely control international collaboration, and so much more.
the problem is that the scientific community will rightfully revolt and the rest of the world will pull ahead of the U.S. in a relatively short amount of time. plus, since open science will have been long dead in the U.S. under such conditions, random breakthroughs at a basement or a non-prestigious university will cease to exist as a concept.
China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen. rather, it's an indicator of how open the open science in the U.S. is
> China and India piggybacking is the least bad thing to happen.
So... the US and European tax- and insurance payers are supposed to pay the billions of dollars for R&D and amortization, just for China to copy everything?
It's bad enough if China does that for their internal market. But they don't stop there, their clones and fakes flood back into our markets as well, leading to regular warnings such as [1] from government authorities for consumer safety.
This is unsustainable on so many levels, it needs to stop.
[1] https://www.swissmedic.ch/swissmedic/de/home/humanarzneimitt...
US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization. They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system. The costs for the producers aren't really a factor.
> US and European payers aren't paying for neither R&D nor amortization.
Of course we do. A lot of the foundational research happens at universities, funded with taxpayer money in the form of research grants.
> They're paying a negotiated price that depends mostly on how much value the drug provides to the patient and the health system.
Only partially. The pharma companies roughly know how much it cost them to get the compound past all the trial stages and how many compounds failed along the path. The usual method is that the rich nations pay for R&D amortization and poor countries pay at-cost for manufacture.
Nearly every convenience of modern civilization is funded with taxpayer money, so that reasoning is without merit.
Yeah, but usually, we pay for stuff with taxes and we benefit.
I wouldn't have much of a problem if China and India would just steal our stuff to benefit their own population - given the widespread poverty there, that's development aid.
But where I draw the line is when China and India undermine our own markets with copycats.
So we should instead pay so that some companies can do huge profits?
Guess why I wrote in my original post that the entire system needs a drastic reform.
What is fundamentally unsustainable is the positive feedback loop of maintaining secrecy or exclusivity on information.
Issue of pharma development is not that you need a protection from copycats. You need to pass a mountain of regulations and bureaucracy. Most of the medications are easily copyable but would take years to be able to get to the market.
See insulin prices difference in europe vs US
> It doesn't make sense to extend drug patent lengths though because often enough, after the release of a compound, it takes just a few years for a new and updated version of it to be researched.
I think this is an inversion of cause and effect.
Are you implicitly arguing that derivative art isn't a thing?
Chinese and Western models on IP are completely different. In our system, the inventor of a Thing gets a period of exclusive rights and everyone who wants to build off of that Thing has to pay license fees to cover the expenses of the original inventor.
In China, copying a Thing is seen completely different (well, at least as far as I know, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt) - an appreciation that the original inventor of the Thing did something good. Getting copied is a symbol of honor.
Both worldviews are completely valid, but it's obvious IMHO that these two views cannot coexist in one single global capitalist economy framework.
I meant more with the timing thing. If a workalike drug undermines the argument for long drug copyright, what are the implications of a copycat plot?
> the permit process for medical compounds takes years and costs billions
Seems like we are coming up on a limit where if they put that much more money into R&D + marketing, then won't be able to afford the product anyway.
So this counterpoint is practically moot for all but the most wealthy people.
But it's much more important that a cancer drug become cheap and readily available than any "youth adult" novel slop
I know someone in pharma.
They drop insane money up front to do a trial, get approved, and then have low single-digit years to recoup all that investment before the new medication goes off patent a competitor markets a generic that blows up the market and likely isn't as well-tested.
And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
But I guess that AI will fix all these perverse incentives Real Soon Now.
> And then, in the extreme case, you might get blown away on the street and have your murderer canonized.
Ahem
That was health insurance. Different beast.
Not excusing pharma, but that bit of extreme casting doesn’t really belong in the conversation.
Like most things in life, “It Depends” is probably applicable, here. Copyright, patents, and trademark exist for a reason.
Abuse of these structures, is the real issue.
Like people that argue for unfettered capitalism, or total legalization of all vice, we need to think about basic human nature, when discussing these things. That doesn’t happen, usually. It’s either all or nothing. We don’t consider that moderation, and benevolent structure, are possible (which they might not always be, considering human nature).
The hard part is imposing just enough structure to ensure that we get maximum effect.
About a month ago, there was a post about the “Pareto Front,” that point at which maximum desired effect is achieved, with optimal resource usage, and side effects. The zenith.
That can also apply to social infrastructure, but it’s really, really difficult, and lawyers and social scientists don’t think that way.
I honestly feel as if very few people take basic human nature into account, when designing pretty much anything.
Pay attention to "might". The difference between health insurance and pharma is academic when hate-mongers are asserting authority.
That can be applied to anything, including tech. I don't think bringing in extremes, improves the conversation.
I seem to remember a guy living in a cabin, writing manifestos, and mailing bombs to tech people and academics.
So someone who has suffered incurable harm and damage at the hands of health insurers is a "hate monger" while the health insurance executive prioritising their company profits over human health is just a normal person doing their normal job?
If that's true then that value system is entirely messed up and needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
To paraphrase John Calvin, "The mind is a factory for rationalizations."
Once we've set ourselves up as judge; jury; and executioner, the unintended consequences abound.
Apt. And that fits both parties in this situation.
Copyright isn’t just fiction novels. Copyright drives investment in books, media, software etc.
Sure. I think copyright is broken far beyond just the length of it, but let's focus on the length of copyright. There's a phenomenon called the Copyright Cliff, where works published from the early to mid 20th century are unavailable far more often than older books. The Atlantic wrote about Paul J. Heald's study of this back in 2013.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-h...
> There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
> Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."
And still would all the same with a 20 year term instead of what we have now…
It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.
Not for e. g. 70 years.
I think most people are in support of some financial incentives via protection, but 70 years is just insane.
If anything, the more popular the work, the faster it should be put into the public domain.
A kid growing up obsessed with a franchise is unlikely to ever be permitted to create and sell derivative works within their lifetime.
It wouldn't have mattered how long copyright is if it wasn't expanded beyond the immediate economic desincentives that it is supposed to address for the most insidious problems it causes. It should be been limited exclusively to the combined right to reproduction and distribution. Yes, that means that I could reproduce the protected work without limit, so long as don't distribute it. Also means that I could distribute the protected work so long as I do only the copies I acquired.
I, like you, through for a while that length was the problem, now I've poked around enough and known about enough actual examples where shorter length wouldn't have prevented the problems that happens with copyright. The content Sony had repeatedly removed from people's libraries was well within copyright term, shorter copyright wouldn't have saved it. What would have saved it is copyright scope that never extended to controlling access to copies already sold
Original copyright was 14 years + 14 years - then it was changed to 28.
I'd love to see it brought back down to that again.
Very much this. And another problem is that the US forced most of the world to adopt similar laws through various cartels, oh, sorry, trade agreements. I distinctly remember when suddenly it was no longer okay to openly sell pirated software in Russia "because we're joining WTO". I still have no idea why we joined it.
reminds me of the DMCA which was essentially forced to be approved
https://youtu.be/O0-j89LJysY
> If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.
If you spend five years writing a book and then get to sell it for two years, and everyone will just think "I'll get it in two years", you might not like that.
This is actually a fairly well studied area and surprisingly even a term as short as two years would likely be enough to ensure that a profit was returned on the investment. Most media including books, movies, music and video games earns the overwhelming share of its profits in the first 4 weeks after its release and sales decay quickly in the first year hitting single digit percentage by year end. At two years out you'd be approaching zero. The curves differ between the media types (movies and video games decay fastest, music decays slowest) but they are close enough to generalize. The only major complication for an extremely short copyright length would be media that experience a resurgence due to developing a cult following, going viral or some other form of mass interest later on.
Personally, I'd still prefer a term of 10 years since it is psychologically more appealing and allows for the rarer cases where a work becomes popular well after its release. It would also be a better fit for music so it would avoid the complication of having different rules for different media types.
Lack of protections didn't stop Homer and a "few" others.
Unless you were paid during those five years
Who's going to pay you to work for five years for a book that has a two-year commercial window, and even for that many people won't buy it until another company that just does printing sells it for half price two years from the first published date?
Well, if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit, it would make sense to pay you a reasonable salary for the five years it takes you to write it. It's not completely implausible that people would pay for something that could be had for cheaper soon, considering that there are grifters selling "new editions" (with a publication date in the future, to game recency-biased search algorithms) of out-of-copyright works that are available for free elsewhere.
The real problem is that it's hard to predict the commercial success of a creative work, especially when it doesn't exist yet. Publishing is a hit-based where most books barely sell, but then a few make more than enough to cover the losses incurred by giving long-shot authors a chance.
With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
> if you could somehow guarantee that your book would sell enough copies in that two-year window to make a million dollars profit
This is madness.
> With much shorter copyright terms, I guess only sequels of already-popular works would get significant funding.
Even then - who would buy it if they could just wait two years and read it for much less?
I’m pretty sure they meant the “post death” copyright, considering the context.
Just make it 20 years, like patents.
Two years is too short because it won't protect from commercial exploition against a creators wishes.
The creator is not the only person to consider here. We don't grant copyrights just to give creators a funny kind of royalty-pension they can pass to their heirs. We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public. Copyright ultimately must be judged on how well it serves the public benefit, not on how much power or wealth it gives to authors directly (at the expense of others).
Did you ever publish anything? First year or two it is mostlu pushing marketing/pr, and the long tail of trickle of money is where the true earnings lie. Also, for many works of art it takes more than 2 years to produce a next piece, and even if it was less, it’s not sure if it will actually sell.
Anything below 5-10 years and you have literal starving authors. Anything less than 5 and you may as well abolish it altogether.
If all the earnings are in the tail then what the heck is in the head? or are you talking about the case where sales are flat and it's all tail?
we have literal "starving authors" - they pretty much all need second jobs to survive.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
"Artists don't deserve to build wealth off of their own work" is certainly one point-of-view.
that's one way to wilfully misrepresent what I said.
the point of view was that they already aren't.
I'd rather give it to individuals than corporations at least. It's useful as a lever to protect the weak from the powerful. Perhaps it should simply not be transferable? Another alternative would be for its power to weaken over time in some way.
In a recent one of these threads someone suggested that a short term starts when the work changes hands (or, I'd also say when a contract/instrument is made including it, or a payment is made allowing control).
So, you could keep it to get your full X years (I like 20), or lease/sell and the work would enter the public domain sooner.
Then you will prevent corporations from paying authors to create work altogether.
You don't think they would still pay them for the right to publish, if not ownership of the copyright itself?
They can still sell the stuff for 10-20 years and make a huge profit. They just can't use it for multi-generational runaway growth.
We live in a world where there is an absolute abundance of art, music, novels. You can find it everywhere, huge amounts of it either free or very cheaply.
In what way is the system as it exists currently failing to encourage the creation of new works?
It encourages creation of new works just fine, but at the expense of creating billions of tiny monopolies that last for generations, which get aggregated into huge monopolies, ultimately making ordinary people into criminals for wanting to preserve or modify the works that make up their culture.
My point is that it doesn't need to do that. Copyright could still encourage creation of new works with a much shorter duration, without the downside of locking our culture up in monopolies for life + 70.
None of that contravenes the purpose of copyright in encouraging the creation and sharing of new works.
You could equally solve the issue by providing provisions for archival. Or a provision that requires a work to be freely available for sale.
The creator having a monopoly on the work seems to me to encourage the creation and sharing of work as intended.
Most of that art is being created irrespective of copyright, though. Much of it uses exceptions to copyright and some is straight up in violation (most "fan art"/fanfiction). It's either not monetised or monetised through things like Patreon.
I wouldn't say we have more "traditional" art that an author spends time creating with the vision of selling copies for years to come, than we did when copyright terms were shorter.
I doubt that's true.
Is there a lot of fan art, yes, there's also massive amounts of original works as well. There is no lack of either.
I don't have any numbers on fan art vs original works floating around the web, but even those original works aren't being monetised via copyright. They would be created even if copyright was abolished or significantly weakened.
What you are describing is the view of copyright set down in the US Constitution, but it doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world. In many countries, copyright is strongly bound up with the author's moral rights.
Who gets to define those moral rights?
Legislation. There is a whole Wikipedia article about moral rights if you want to educate yourself.
Meta: the point of this site is conversation. You don't have to respond. With an open question like this is probably best to assume the asker means "who #in your opinion# gets too define those rights".
Also, yes legislative bodies. But in eg USA that means a corp like Disney pays to draft the law and pays legislators to vote for it.
On a site like this that is very American-centric, where moral rights are not as known a thing as in other countries due to different legal traditions, it was reasonable to assume the OP was unaware that moral rights are a clearly defined concept in legislation already, not something vague and up in the air. If the OP wants to formulate their question more clearly, they can.
Mandating that creators lose control and the ability to profit from their work almost immediately will absolutely not encourage the production of new works.
> We grant copyrights to encourage production of new works for the benefit of the public
Which includes giving creators royalty rights that can be passed on to their heirs, so the elder author can finish their manuscript on their deathbed as a gift to their family.
Congress has currently chosen a duration of life + 70, but my point is that it's absurdly far beyond anything necessary to encourage the production of new works. When you consider the costs of copyright monopolies to the public, it's clearly out of whack. As I said, the majority of revenue from copyrighted works happens in the first couple of years of release.
I completely agree that life+70 is absolutely obscene, as my response to your parent post clarifies. I moved on from that since I thought my stance was clear (14 + 14 or 28 total), and moved on to “we should still honor the copyright even if they die, because heirs matter.”
NEVER have I argued for life+70 and I never will.
Has this ever happened, or is it a scenario you made up in your mind?
I know a few great works were published posthumously, but most of these were because somebody thought it was really important to share, not because it was a golden goose they wanted to start... milking.
I don’t have a specific example; but I don’t like the idea of an author, photographer, painter, songwriter, etc’s familt losing their copyright because their plane crashed the day after they recorded a record.
And again, to be clear, since apparently people think I’m defending life+70. I am abso-fucking-lutely not.
I want 14+14 or raw 28 back.
Edit: oh apparently I do, thanks Kagi Assistant.
Otis Redding Died in a plane crash literally 3 days after recording a famous track and his family earned a LOT after his passing.
He was arguing against two years. A lifetime is fine.
> We don't grant copyrights to give authors a kind of royalty-based pension for their old age and their heirs.
"We" is doing a lot of work here. I realize that it's basically impossible for an entire population to have coherent motivations, but I support copyright because I think artists have the right to control what happens with their work and to sell it if they can. I believe that this right extends, like all rights, until the end of the author's life. I don't really care one bit about encouraging the production of new works.
> until the end of the author's life.
which is too long, and also too short - what about authors who wrote finished their book on their deathbed? Then their rights are shorter than someone young - an unfair discrimination.
That's why age should be irrelevant. Copyright is useful, and should be granted. However, current copyright grants last far too long - age plus some years beyond. Not to mention corporations lobbying to increase the length right as some copyrights for some works are about to enter public domain.
Therefore, copyright should be granted for a single period and end - like patents. 20 years seems to be a good middle ground, but i could hear arguments for slightly longer or shorter.
Same exact duration for all authors: as long as they’re around and capable of caring. It’s not the same when duration is expressed numerically, sure. But consider: no life is the same in this way (until immortality is discovered), yet all should be valued equally (or so I hope and believe). Timing life makes them unavoidably unequal - and thus differences in lifetime shouldn’t be a criteria to use for comparing rights. That’d be actual age discrimination.
I suggest to rather look at it under the angle whether estates should be able to inherit author’s identity (or some of it), to continue the will.
How about "We the people", as stated in the Constitution? The Constitution itself defines the purpose of copyright, and it is not the purpose you state.
Nothing is going to protect moneyless creator against multi-billion transnational greed-driven corporations equipped with lawyer armies if the law actually encourage these corporations to actually thrive and further harden the rules in their own interests.
Abolishing the copyright or not is not that important if nothing is done in front of that to guarantee that every single human are granted unconditional access to decent life conditions.
IMO, the bigger issue is all the things copyright covers. I don't think there's a particularly damning public interest in being able to publish an author's book without paying them. For art preservation reasons, the copyright limit shouldn't be indefinite, but IMO as long as somebody's around to claim ownership, and offer a legitimate means of obtaining access to a work of art, it's not a big deal for them to have a monopoly on such.
But copyright covers a lot more than just the right to produce copies of a specific work. The monopoly on derivative works serves the public significantly less. IMO, this one should taper off pretty rapidly. Maybe 20 years as is, then another 20 where you lose the ability decide who can or can't use your work, but they still owe you royalties.
Then there's the clusterfuck that is software. With how rapidly the world around software changes, its protections should be substantially shorter. For derivative works of source code, I'd pitch skipping the complete monopoly step entirely. You get a decade or two where people using your software owe you royalties unless you say otherwise, then nothing.
One should pay a exponential "upholding" fee doubling every year of copyright. People would be very careful with clinging to rights- when they have a yearly break even.
Harry Potter copyright is still being heavily utilized (milked?) 30 years after the first book's release.
Now you are using the legislators' rationale that money is being made so we need to protect that, forgetting to weigh the cost for the community.
It would make sense to make it possible, but increasingly expensive to extend the copyright. It's fine for Disney to keep their successful creations, it just makes no sense to drag all other copyrighted works in existence along for the ride.
You want to tip the balance even more in favour of the richest corporations? Really?
We're there already, considering the cost of actually enforcing your rights, but it would be bizarre to codify that into law.
That's an outlier. Most works don't see so much public interest after such a long time.
But why should this be allowed? Fairy tales are still popular, but they don't have copyright either.
Sometimes I imagine the world where each installment got, say, 14 years of copyright exclusivity before becoming part of a shared cultural mythos that anyone could contribute to. Imagine the boon for small artists to have access to such recognizable characters, but also the big-budget takes and spins on the setting that could come from literally anyone.
Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.
I'm not sure what your point is. Harry Potter is in the top ten highest grossing media franchises ever. Sure, top 10 franchises make a lot of money, but they're outliers. Is it in the public interest to grant every author in the country a copyright monopoly for life + 70 so that we can ensure JK Rowling's grandchildren continue to make billions from Harry Potter? Clearly not!
You're free to release your own work with Creative Commons License (or any other license that shorten the copyright).
> Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose
Creative work takes a lot of effort and resources (ex: movie production, games, books (hello Knuth)) and can be easily copied/imitated in a digital age.
It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
> It you think copyright should be shorter to everyone, then inheriting something valuable shouldn't be a thing as well?
inheritance has nothing to do with copyright. Financial assets are not monopolies. Copyright is only a valuable asset because of the granted monopoly on copying/distribution.
Therefore, to reduce the value copyright has (as it currently does seem to have too much), reducing the granted terms should be sufficient. Like patents, a good 20 years seems like a sufficiently long time to recover cost of production, while letting people who are currently alive to produce derivatives of it afterwards.
Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets? I think copyright should be as long as ownership of any other asset.
If I spend $20m on building a house or creating a computer game, why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not? I would have a monopoly on this specific building and on this specific creative work, but anyone is free to build/create anything else.
If J. Rowling created Harry Potter universe, why her family can't own it indefinitely? We somehow accept this notion for other assets, but treat copyright differently.
p.s. creative work is more valuable as it has something that money can't buy (authenticity, taste, sincerity, etc)
> why house can be inherited indefinitely and creative work is not
Because copying houses is inherently expensive, while copying creative works is inherently free. To make creative works act like houses you have to add artificial cost to copying, which is a tax the public has to pay for the entire duration of copyright.
If the public has to pay a tax they should get something out of it, and that something is the incentive for authors to create new works. But does copyright have to be for life + 70 in order to incentivize new works? Clearly not! It could be much shorter while still providing plenty of incentive.
Public doesn't pay a creative tax. You're free to buy or not buy any creative work. This is different with other assets though, you have to pay someone indefinitely to rent a place to live, even though building (or land) was built hundreds years ago and just gets inherited by new generation of landlords every 75 years.
> You're free to buy or not buy any creative work.
You also don't have to rent/buy a place to live, but I wouldn't want to live a life without a roof over my head or access to creative works of my culture. When you accept that access to media is a necessity (and people today do treat it as such, just try finding someone who doesn't listen to music, watch videos, read books...), you clearly see that having copyright is a decision made by the state that results in wealth transfer from every citizen to authors and publishers.
Those authors/publishers do provide value, so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but as with every market intervention, the specifics need to be carefully considered.
>If I spend $20m on building
Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house? Wouldn't that also be reasonable. At least as long as it stands. I don't think that would be unfair comparison.
> Why don't the builders get infinite royalties on use of that house
They do, some build to rent indefinitely or sell to other who rent out the property.
I mean the actual workers. I do not get royalty checks for the building I helped on during one summer. Homeowners don't send monthly money to workers that build their house or renovated it.
It's the same in creative work creation, no? Filming crew / game devs don't own any copyright and property rights. They explicitly give it up under contract/hiring terms.
>Why you want to reduce value of creative work, but not a value of other assets?
The framing isn't charitable. People want to weaken copyright because it is a government granted monopoly. There are negative economic effects (i.e., for everyone) to government granted monopolies. Other assets generally aren't government granted monopolies.
Owning the copyright to a work grants the exclusive right to profit off that work, but so does owning a house grant the exclusive right to profit off that house. House ownership is not a monopoly because there are other houses, and you can build a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost. Similarly, copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works, and you can make a new one if there's sufficient demand to justify the cost.
The negative economic effects of monopolies stem from a lack of competition leading to insufficient supply, but there's no lack of competition or insufficient supply of copyrighted works. Even if copyright were indefinite like other property rights, it wouldn't stymie the supply of new works, but rather expand investment due to raising the future expected profit.
> copyright ownership is not a monopoly because there are other copyrighted works
they are not fungible, unlike houses.
Also, if you could copy a house like you could copy digital goods (i would download a car), i am also going to claim that the "monopoly" on the house must also be shortened.
Sure, there are idiosyncratic preferences and some people really want that one famous work, but there are also idiosyncratic preferences when it comes to houses, and particularly famous houses command a premium, but that doesn't render houses nonfungible. For most people, any house they enjoy living in will do, and any content they enjoy consuming will do.
You would download a house or a car, but the people making new houses or cars would only offer them for download if they can charge enough for each copy to make back their original investment. So houses and cars could be expected to cost about as much as a movie ticket or book or game. That those are currently much cheaper is also an indication that competition is successfully working to drive down prices close to the cost of production.
Her family can own their copies of Harry Potter forever.
But copyright restricts others from building on top of previous works. Can her family forever sue anyone into poverty for naming a wizard “Harry”? Does that even make sense in 100 years from now when most people have never heard of Harry Potter anymore?
For your building analogy, it would be more like the builders created your building there, and now you own it. It has a red roof and blue shutters. And also the government passed a law that said nobody else can own a building ever again with a red roof and blue shutters, otherwise you, the owner of the idea of those colors, can take possession of every new building like that.
I'm still waiting to get my first revenue from copyright content I created 10 years ago. Not everyone gets instant recognition.
Also the issue is that it’s time capped only instead instead of having also a profit capped threshold.
Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).
>Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
Copyright does no such thing. The copyright owner is free to alter or change their material at any time, or to discard it and force it to remain unused until it deteriorates and is destroyed (e.g. video game preservation is mostly done by copyright violators).
Of course it does, don't be myopic.
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984: because the copyright was enforced to ensure the work was not altered. This is ++good.
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to originator/owner agency. I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this in this day and age ... information does want to be free, after all.
A public fingerprinting/attestation service would separate the two functions we care about: 1) letting creators monetise and control commercial exploitation for a limited time, and 2) giving everyone a reliable way to verify that a given copy matches a claimed original.
The second does not require a multi-generational monopoly, and I am not advocating for that. I do however believe that some social mechanism for ensuring the materials I care about land on my desk un-altered, is quite important.
Copyright doesn't protect a work, there's probably also a reasonable argument that exact reproduction of a work is overrated in the first place. Others could just as easily produce a verbatim copy of 1984 if there wasn't copyright. The original theatrical release of Star Wars is almost impossible to find because Lucas altered it several times. Copyright isn't protecting the work, it's letting the holders exploit a rerelease 50 years after the initial release.
1984 has been out of copyright in most of the world for 6 years and that, if anything, has made it easier to find an unmodified copy.
> and yet we extend copyright 70
That's an americocentric view. Copyrights are shorter around the world. In fact, iirc, US has some of the longest ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_by_...
Might want to check your facts mate.
"For some categories of works, the minimum duration is shorter: for example, the minimum term for applied art is 25 years, while movies have a minimum term of 50 years. Most countries have opted for a longer term of protection, as permitted."
However, I stand corrected because I was under impression they expired after 50 years in Europe, or less. Turns out the movies I had in mind were intentionally made available to public but this did not come as a result of copyright expiration.
My bad.