In my opinion, the best solution for everyone involved is to allow companies to renew copyrights annually into perpetuity after an initial period, but charge a non-trivial renewal fee and increase it with every renewal.
If you're a company like Disney, renewing certain properties should really make you think after it starts to cut into the balance sheet. Most works wouldn't generate enough revenue to justify the renewal and would fall into the public domain. Disney wouldn't be holding thousands of unrelated works hostage.
Why bother? Why should we allow entities to continue to monopolize intellectual property long after the actual innovators are dead? If Disney's so great, they should be able to come up with some new shit. Otherwise, they're just sucking up oxygen.
These rules are being abused to stifle innovation and competition, simple as that. I don't have any problem in principle of some exponential scale, but it just seems like a solution for a non-problem.
I believe the corporate sponsor deserves credit (and protection) for work created under its direction.
The problem is that the Constitution specifies "exclusive rights for a limited time", which the supreme court appears to have interpreted as _any finite timespan_ [1].
Of course, that only establishes an upper bound. congress is free to introduce legislation to weaken current protections.
I don't think they "deserve" it. I do think we'd be wise to incentivise IP creation though, which the credit and protection of IP creation does. Though I'm not a fan of the current lengthy timespan.
Intellectual property entering the public domain after the original creators are long dead is not an extreme.
Perpetuating private control over what was already promised to be in the public domain is the extreme.
Anything taken out of former copyright limits probably already is in the public domain even in spite of the legislation without compensation to those who have standing, which just happens to be the American people. Legal has never pursued that avenue. Pity.
> it needs shortening but any proposal with 'original creator' center and foremost is basically ignoring the reality of modern content production
There's a handful of ways to do it if you are not going to center copyright terms around the life of the original creator, some of which I think are better than others but I'll try to leave most of my opinion out of this.
1. You can center it around first publication. In this scenario you actually do not automatically retain copyrights unless you actually publish, and then you would likely need to define in detail what publication is.
Is sharing in an email message or WhatsApp "publication"? I would argue not, but the law would need to reflect this. Again without spinning this discussion off into a tangent, there's probably multiple ways you could write that into the law, but some language like "made available to the public for free or for a fee" etc. or whatever the American legalese equivalent of that sentence would be. IANAL
2. You could center it around the registration date with the Library of Congress. Again, in this scenario you do not actually automatically retain copyright, and while it massively simplifies the letter of the law, it shifts more of the burden to the Library of Congress to retain records. In this scenario, you would file a registration with a full copy of the work or specifications or some other means of defining it in the case of things like statues. Probably the main advantage of this is that the Library of Congress then has a full copy of the text, source code, blueprints, etc. that it can then automatically publish itself upon the copyright's expiration.
Anything you do though, I would do it for a fixed term, say, just to pick a random number out of the air, 50 years and no more. No renewals, just one copyright term and that is it. You can choose to relinquish it to the public domain before that time has come to pass but you could not extend it.
Note that the parent comment says "why should we allow entities to monopolize IP _long after the creators are dead". Reducing copyright length to a more sane level would prevent exactly this: How on earth is arresting and mildly reversing the ceaseless march of extended copyright terms "swinging to the opposite extreme?"
It's quite simple. Disney and other companies have enough power to influence the law. If you change the law to something more reasonable they will just change it back.
It is extreme in the sense that current copyright extremely favours major companies. Going the opposite way extremely disfavours major companies with IP that spans centuries.
You have to find a compromise so that both companies and everyone else is happy with.
The compromise is simple. Allow copyright extensions indefinitively on an individual basis in exchange for a fee. If mickeymouse is profitable to disney then let them have it. They will get it at any cost anyway and destroy a lot of things in the process. Sacrificing perpetually profitable IP is a small cost in exchange for all the works that are no longer profitable which is probably more than 99% of all works.
Major companies think the current situation isn't anywhere extreme enough. Their customers have some rights, and some courts will even let them exercise them: that's unacceptable.
There's no chance Disney will be happy with any solution which involves losing any level of control over any copyright they currently own (or will own in the future).
Although they would, I'm sure, be happy for other people to have to pay to maintain their copyright, making it easier to plagiarise poorer creators.
Mickey Mouse is a harmless example. If we change the laws to let Disney have Mickey forever, we are also allowing companies to own forever something that could make people's lives better.
It also presents another problem: one of the objectives of copyright is to reward innovation. If you created something new, it makes sense to let you profit from it for a time. But if you can profit from it forever, you have no reason to innovate more.
Not innovating more goes against one of the objectives of copyright. It's also bad for the economy, for the people, for everyone. We need innovation.
The point of steadily increasing the fees for renewal is that you can't profit indefinitely. You can own something forever, but eventually you'll have to pay fortunes for it.
No the "opposite extreme" would be advocating for what I believe, which is the abolishment of copyright in its entirety
A compromise would be to meet someone in the middle, say like on the original term of Copyright, 14 years plus a single 14 Year extension to the Original Creator if they are alive
Extending copyright some time after the author's death makes the incentive to create the same for older and younger authors. Also makes killing authors less profitable. The trick is how long should "some time" be.
Let me just turn the table around. Why should intellectual property copyright not last in perpetuity? A core proposition in Western world is that intellectual property is indistinguishable from other properties such as house you own or piece of art you create or your stamp collection or your startups. When you die, you have right to transfer these properties to your designated heir. Your properties does not become a public properties when you die even when it would have been good for the society. Why intellectual property should have vastly different treatment?
BTW, I am absolutely not advocating that current definition of intellectual properties is correct or even fair. I am just saying that assuming if this definition was ideal, wouldn't above make sense?
> A core proposition in Western world is that intellectual property is indistinguishable from other properties such as house you own or piece of art you create or your stamp collection or your startups.
It really is not.
What makes you believe that it is?
> When you die, you have right to transfer these properties to your designated heir.
A great many people who don't get to inherit their wealth have been questioning this mantra for centuries, probably longer (albeit more cautiously).
Media companies have cast IP as such, but it really didn't start that way. IP started as a way to encourage creation, and it acknowledged as artificial.
Someone here on HN suggested to watch a popular tv-show with the laughs removed from the soundtrack.
When this is an easy and _legal_ thing to do (perhaps a link from the author of that comment to YouTube). I’ll say we’re starting to see a working copyright law.
I’m not sure a perpetual renewal helps with that.
OTOH another issue a new law should address is how to make sure originals of a work are preserved for the public at all. Original recordings of music albums f.ex.
So perhaps a required registration, bundled with a way to save an original work could be a good thing. It would be like the coyleft licenses that require the work in its “preferred” from to be made available.
Interesting idea. Except Disney would pay tens of millions to keep the original Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. Hell they might even pay much more to guard against weakening their brand.
So, While your idea ensures public domain for many works I fear it extends the biggest players their perpetual rights because they can afford it as a result of their scale.
Yes, in lobbying costs. And their lobbying efforts hurt the rest of the industry. I really think Mickey, Donald and Goofy should be allowed to enter the public domain. Companies need to grow and old things need to be shared in the commons.
They'll lose some initial money of course, if everyone could produce Mickey Mouse shirts, but Disney et. al. would have to come up with new tricks, new icons and try to make new things instead of the constant barrage of rehashed garbage media we get today.
It's not the shirts that are the problem, it's a massive I Flux of random Mickey Mouse media that would saturate the market and dilute the media. Do any of us really doubt that there would be a bunch of Mickey Mouse porn?
I'm not in favor of long copyrights, but I think in the case there would be a real cultural loss if there was unfettered access to this particular icon. Does that justify full control by Disney at this late stage? Probably not, but some middle ground with increasing costs (maybe an increasing percentage of profit from that brand?) might be worth trying.
The whole system is pretty messed up at this point, so why not test out some interesting ideas? As a side benefit, maybe Disney and others like them won't fight it quite so hard, as it would be costly but not the existential threat to their core brand they see come up every couple evades.
> cultural loss if there was unfettered access to this particular icon
As a counter argument look at Snow White. That story is in the public domain. I think you’d be hard pressed to make a case that that has harmed society.
Regardless Disney will continue to have a trademark on the Mouse. So, it will continue to be a cultural icon for the company. We’ll just also have steamboat Willie generics in the marketplace as well.
> Do any of us really doubt that there would be a bunch of Mickey Mouse porn?
Look: sight unseen, having no prior knowledge, I would put money down that I could find a thousand unique images of Mickey Mouse created in 2017 or earlier.
That's just how the internet works, and copyright doesn't hold much sway on that front.
There already are lots of random Mickey Mouse media, they just aren't legal to sell in any place that respects Disney's copyright. But Rule 34 says that Mickey Mouse porn is out there, and some of it is probably legal (e.g. using a costume purchased in a Disney-licensed store as a fetish item).
Mickey Mouse porn is probably legal in the US too; if you wanted to try and argue that it's protected as parody or satire. I mean we have porn versions of Pirates of the Caribbean as well as Rick and Morty (Dick and Morty .. it's actually pretty hilarious)
The porn version of pirates of the caribbean, as far as I remember, doesn't use the name "Pirates of the Caribbean". Also doesn't use the name of important characters.
> a massive influx of random Mickey Mouse media that would saturate the market and dilute the media
this is full of hypothetical, while we exactly know what would happen because we have concrete case studies to work from, like the old star wars expanded universe.
Normally the bigger players are at least investing in their brand. Mickey Mouse is not a hidden asset locked in a vault, it is everywhere for everyone to see. Not ideal maybe but worth it to unlock the ton of asset that lies unexploited and will never be exploited because the generation that has some sort of emotional attachment to it has disappeared (retired or dead) by the time they could use it.
The problem is still with the concentration of the media. There is no price you can put that Disney cannot bulk pay for everything they own that wouldn't be destroying any competition from the little copyright holders. So in effect it could decrease competition with the only upside of increasing the government income.
Arguably, this is a good deal, especially if the renewal fees go to further public good like archiving of public domain works. Disney would pay tens of millions to keep Mickey, Goofy, and Donald under copyright, but they'll quickly triage their renewal budget and let most everything else go.
The greater damage from blanket copyright extension is the long tail of works that no one would pay to keep copyright on, but are still protected with the same inflexible term as an ongoing piece of IP like Mickey.
After 30 years if it's not generating $1B a year you let it go. That would make most creations pretty cheap to keep for the first 15 years, corporation level expensive from 15 years to 25 years and global phenomenon level only after 30 years.
If that sounds too aggressive maybe double it only every 2 years.
The US is allowing Disney to become a behemoth of a company without competitors, so even if the price rises up to a million trillion gajillion dollars they would be able to pay without much effort.
This basically turns it into a tax. You are saying that it will make more money for you than it costs to renew the fee. This would cause the vast majority of copyright held works to fall into the public domain even if the fee is very small.
I'm in favor of making the fee increase exponential though, just to make sure the things do eventually end up in the public domain. Say the first 20 years are free. Next 10 years are some nominal fee, maybe a couple of hundred bucks, but then you have to renew every 10 years and the fee increases one order of magnitude each time. Would Disney be willing to pay 20 billion dollars to keep Star Wars out of the public domain in 2077? Of course a billion dollars might be pocket change by then, who knows?
Why, start with e.g. $1 the first year, and double it each subsequent year. For Star Wars, even after 25 years the sum would still be worth paying; maybe even after 30.
For the vast majority of other commercially successful works, the original 20 years would probably be a very reasonable cutoff: few would generate seriously more than $1M in revenue to justify the copyright extension.
IMHO making the payment every year would start to get onerous. Maybe it's premature optimization but I was thinking that keeping the timeline to once per decade would fall roughly in line with the pace at which Copyright systems normally move.
It's also a "big government" idea, but having a central database for copywritten works would be a boon IMHO. It could have the year of creation, author, and a price with a contact/payment system for using the work instead of the huge hodgepodge we have now. I don't think anybody would disagree that finding the actual rights holders and negotiating licenses is anything but a nightmare on older works. It could also keep a copy of the original work for release when the copyright expires, the same way the Library of Congress keeps a copy of every book. Storage requirements would be high, but they could be paid through the fees people pay to keep their stuff in copyright. This would also mean a return to explicitly registering for copyright on a work, but IMHO that's a good thing. If you don't care enough to register why should the government care enough to protect your work? Registration should be dead simple, upload a copy/good description of the work to your copyright account and bam, you're registered. The only requirement on the upload is that the format must not be locked or proprietary, there must be an open/free viewer available.
Downside of this system is that it's massive. Just absolutely enormous. Makes healthcare.gov look like a Geocities page. Huge number of man hours to maintain it every year. It ends up being the cultural database of the US very quickly.
With a setup like I described, you could pay $2048 outright and forget about it for 10 years.
A central database of copyrighted works would be great for preserving it. A lot of copyrighted work is usually published anyway (else you use an NDA, not copyright).
Explicit registration, as long as it's indeed just registration, might have some merit, too. But I wonder how would it work for evolving copyrighted works, especially code. E.g. GPL leans heavily on copyright. How often should a GPL'd codebase be re-submitted to registration? I suppose explicit registration could be but an optional extra safety measure.
I don't think there will be a need to register a copyright unless you plan to make money on something. Maybe there could be a concept of a defensive copyright to prevent someone from downloading your work and submitting it as their own, but if you don't care who copies the work you don't really need protection against other people copying your work.
The point about evolving works is a good one. It's kind of silly to have someone register a copyright on a blank page because they plan to add to it every week for a year. I'm also not sure how to handle a case like "We registered Photoshop in 1987, should the copyright expire in 2007 even though the 2007 version is completely different from the 1987 version? But can an artist add 1 microscopic dot to his painting every year and extend the copyright indefinitely for free?" This is where the rubber meets the road with IP law.
I do kind of like the idea of very old versions of software entering the public domain even though the current version is still under copyright.
If you want to go nuts with this, you could have a link from the big copyright database to Github or any similar repo and have a rolling copyright on the release. Code older than commit X is now public domain... I'd be wary of depending on external sources though, the Internet loses stuff all of the time and through negligence or vindictiveness the external sources would be lost. It's probably too much to ask the government to run govhub.
It's awful how the damn mouse is completely poisoning the discussion. There are thousands and thousands of works that aren't entering the public domain. Many movies or older video games are actually inaccessible today because the copyright situation is unclear because for example done doing got used that now world need to get relicensed in order to make the work available and/or it's unclear who to even talk to about that. If non action would move works into public domain a huge part of all those works would be in the public domain and a big part of the problem would be solved. Instead not only is Disney poisoning the well because they care deeply about one particular extreme case of copyright that's still valuable to them, but the entire discussion is hard to have without people bringing up the stupid edge case that's the mouse and derailing the discussion with what's really a very small part of the issue at hand.
Even if non action would move thing to the public domain. How would you know? It seems to me that the uncertainties would still remain.
As you say it might even be unclear who to talk to. How would I protect my self from liability? I mean we’ve had free software licenses of various kinds for quite a few years now, and lawyers are still uneasy about the whole thing.
I assume the system would require copyright to be tracked somewhere so that payments for extension can be made. That place could be used to track. For our stuff for which you know a extension would have had to be filed, absence in the register should be all you need.
A few years ago I wanted to read Virginia Woolf's novel "To The Lighthouse" so I searched for it online and discovered it was public domain in her native Great Britain but still under copyright here in the United States. If I downloaded it from an UK server, would I and/or the owner of the UK server be in violation of copyright? If I bought a reprint in the UK that was printed after it entered public domain, would it be legal for me to carry the book back home? What about having it mailed? Is it realistic to expect the average reader to understand all of these details of various copyright laws across the globe especially in an age where data flows so easily and it isn't even obvious where from?
As the person buying the work, you'd think you wouldn't face potential criminal charges; that this would be a civil case where the copyright holder would have to sue the distributor. However we're seeing copyright cases play out criminally now, with Kim Dotcom fighting his extradition from New Zealand.
Copyright violation is a crime. Has been since the right to monopolize the public domain was enshrined in law (before copyright, there was only the public domain). It can also be a civil matter. But the JAIL time and $500,000 per infraction are criminal penalties.
With a lot of these grey areas it's not really specified in the original laws and you have to look at court cases for legal precedent for how that kind of stuff has gone in the past. I think downloading from a UK server you would be in violation of US copyright law and in principle whoever inherited Woolf's copyright could sue. Also there are customs restrictions on bringing in fake copyright stuff that are sometimes used for fake Rolexes and the like. In practice no one would bother sueing over one copy of a novel.
I always bring this up whenever copyright extension is mentioned: Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" [1], a worthwhile read on the effects of a super-long copyright extension. The story itself is under a Creative Commons license.
Not for stories on copyright. Spider Robinson's story is the only one that has stayed fresh in my mind.
If you are interested in general stuff on copyright, you might want to try Cory Doctorow's books [1] which talk about information and copyright or the articles he published on it at Boing Boing [2]
Thanks for the links! Do you have any recommendations for short stories and books in general that you find cool? I haven't been reading much and I want to change that.
There are way too many on-line SF sites for me to recommend. Just pick one. :-)
Personally, I'm old-fashioned and get my short-story fix via traditional SF magazines like Interzone (UK) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (USA).
If it's hard SF you're looking for, one site that might be worth a look is Compelling Science Fiction [1]. Here's a HN post about it some time ago [2].
P.S. Okay, I'll recommend looking at Locus [3], which covers the SF world. You might be able to get some good recommendations of current SF stuff from there.
P.P.S. This is self-advertistment, but I maintain a Goodreads list of books I've read and would like to read [4]. It's mostly on SF and Science / Nature stuff, but if you are interested in that, you may find some interesting stuff on it.
Disney now has until 2023 to figure out how to extend that date once again. Enter Steamboat Willy, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon and the first animated short by Walt Disney in 1928. Under the 1909 Copyright scheme, the Mickey Mouse character had copyright protection for 56 years (with the renewal), expiring in 1984.
The more relevant deadline is for Winnie the Pooh (first published in 1924). Pooh is worth several billion dollars per year to Disney, so don't be surprised if they try to change the copyright (again) in the next year.
Wait, does the copyright not just cover the actual movie/videos/art/... of that time, still having them own the character itself (since they're actively using it)?
I believe that officially only the movies, etc., would fall into the public domain. But people can make derivative works of public domain items, so they wouldn’t be limited to literal copies of Steamboat Willie. They could show Steamboat Willie using a smartphone.
However, Disney also has trademarks on Mickey Mouse, etc., so using Mickey’s likeness in commercial ways would still be a legal minefield.
I would have thought an ok way of dealing with these things would be after say 30 years to have an $100 annual copyright maintenance fee you have to pay. It'd be no problem for Disney but for 99% of the stuff out there no one would bother.
Sure, let's pretend congress won't do what they are paid to do.
We really have no chance on this issue, the interests in seeing works enter public domain simply aren't commercial enough to supply the requisite lobbying dollars.
Well, then the answer is to stop voting for people willing to take lobbyist money, and for those that were already elected, make a public stink over it.
You can only say that without knowledge of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Prior to that I'd have agreed with you. It was tremendously successful at fundraising from small dollar donations by pushing policies that benefit the many over the few. I don't see a reason why other campaigns can't pick that up and run with it.
That is true, but the 535 other politicians are nearly all centrists or right wingers. Politicians are beholden to their donors. Eliminate the elite donor class, eliminate their interests being represented. I have some optimism that the Democratic party will be reconfigured to some degree. It's either that, or keep losing cyclically.
FDR won four presidential elections and scared the right so badly that they got a constitutional amendment to limit future "damage" to two terms.
So, GP says "Vote for people who aren't interested in taking bribes" and you say "eliminate the donor class" -- those seem like pretty distinct policy recommendations. How are they related?
GP's literal words were "stop voting for people willing to take lobbyist money". The lobbyists and big donations / bundlers come from the same class of people - the wealthy. These dollars come attached with policy positions that favor that class both explicitly (in terms of policies that are explicitly favored) and implicitly (policies that will not be given strong support, i.e. various forms of redistribution).
The only way to run a modern political campaign is with lots of cash, so the cash must be procured somehow. Your two options are to level the playing field with public funding of campaigns (unlikely to happen in the wake of Citizen's United) or for a candidate to raise small dollar donations. The Sanders campaign proved that the latter is possible.
What you said can be read as "the answer is to stop voting", because it would be very very hard to find someone that doesn't want to become filty rich.
And if you find one, well... one person can't do much in politics.
The Constitution has no checks against that. The founders had the opposite fear and largely detested popular democracy and the "rule of the mob". It is functioning as designed.
Godel (the logician of Incompleteness Theorems fame) almost failed his citizenship exam (or whatever it is called) for pointing out that there’s almost nothing you can’t do with a 2/3 majority in Congress. Apparently the functionary was on the verge of rejecting his application for having made an accurate observation but some higher power dove in for a last-minute save.
I still don't understand why we can even make legislative changes in copyright work retroactively. Changes should only apply for whatever comes AFTER the changes.
There's a very solid argument. The Constitution explicitly says that Congress has the right to grant copyright "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts." Since extending copyright after a thing already exists cannot possibly cause it to exist MORE, it doesn't seem to be within Congress's power. And also, if Congress continues to extend copyrights by 10 years every 10 years, it also is no longer a "limited time."
Both of these arguments were put before the Supreme Court in 2003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft), and the argument lost 7-2. Somewhat unusually, the it was not a party-line decision.
There were two points in this argument when I should have seen where the court was going. The first was a question by Kennedy, who observed,
"Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that."
Here follows my clear mistake. Like a professor correcting a student, I answered,
"Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our copyright clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws."
That was a correct answer, but it wasn't the right answer. The right answer was to say that there was an obvious and profound harm. Any number of briefs had been written about it. Kennedy wanted to hear it. And here was where Don Ayer's advice should have mattered. This was a softball; my answer was a swing and a miss.
> Both of these arguments were put before the Supreme Court in 2003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft), and the argument lost 7-2. Somewhat unusually, the it was not a party-line decision.
Can the Supreme Court be lobbied to act in favor of the uber-rich copyright holders? Are they disclosing their conflicts of interest?
The article doesn't go into how Disney was able to preserve it for so long... and continue. So if I copyright something today, can someone explain how I can make sure it is still covered in 2108 ?
Strictly speaking, Disney's already done most of the hard work for you-- barring some sort of massive public policy reversal (unlikely) or societal collapse (probably slightly less unlikely), all you should have to do (under current copyright law) to keep something protected under US copyright law until 2108 is just not die before 2038.
Or, if you published something today as a work for hire, it'd be covered until 2103. Which isn't quite 2108, but surely Disney and their congresscritters will get you that extra five years at some point before it goes into the public domain.
Take a politician down, and a new one takes its place.
If you protest, they put the police to attack protesters. If people get together to fund a campaign to change things, big corporations get 10000x more money on a bigger campaign.
The first time was with the Copyright Act of 1976. That was a major rewrite of US copyright law (probably the most extensive rewrite ever) whose main purpose was to bring US copyright law more in line with that of the rest of the world in preparation for the US joining the Berne Convention.
That included making copyright terms in the US match the terms from most of the rest of the world (life + 50 for works of individual authors, publication + 75 years for works for hire).
Despite the lazy "they bribed politicians" theories others have offered, I've not been able to find any information on whether Disney spent any money lobbying for this. They were almost certainly in favor of it, but it had such widespread support that I doubt they would have needed to.
The other extension of Disney copyright terms was in the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which they certainly did lobby for.
2018 is the last year of the drought... unless the rules change again.
Here's how it's likely to happen. Somebody will float a trial balloon to extend copyright. We will try to oppose it. Because it's an election year, our opposition will have some leverage - the threat of immediate retaliation on those who don't vote the way we want. If our opposition is loud enough, the bill will stall...
... until after the election. Then it will pass, despite the howls of outrage, because then we'd have to remember who betrayed us for two years before we can do anything about it, and they suspect that our memories aren't that long. (And if our memories are that long, we'll have two years of other issues to dilute our outrage on this one.)
I think we're losing sight of the goals of intellectual property law.
Society as a whole benefits greatly from a rich public domain. The starting point in IP law is that there are no rights in ideas. Then from that starting point, we start to carve out exceptions that make sense from a market perspective.
We grant trademarks, because the market benefits from being able to identify the source of a thing.
We grant patents and copyright protection, because they incent innovation, and innovation is good for the market.
The protections that copyright law affords have more than rewarded Walt Disney for his innovations. The Constitution specifically requires that copyright protection be limited in term. In my mind, the time has come for Mickey to drop into the public domain.
How any new legislation on this issue may play out over the next year, brings to mind the old theological saw regarding an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, given the large political incompatibility of the current players.
You may have a point there, but Disney and the Trump administration are, at least publicly, on very different sides in the culture wars currently dominating political discourse.
The culture wars are largely a distraction behind which class war by the rich against everyone else is carried out. Most forces who seems strongly one on side or the other of the culture wars are on the same side of the real war.
It's been extended, regularly, several times. The recent 1976, 1998 have extended it massively (doubling it) and applying their extensions, retroactively much further back.
The 1998 one was particularly egregious--we were right on the verge of having some decent content in the public domain and wham! It's not that I think everything should be public domain, but the current duration is absurd.
Sure, but the economics of preserving something you can’t redistribute are tough, especially as you get out into less popular media. If you could sell copies of those preserved works, it would provide a means to finance the preservation efforts.
Fair use is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Financers and their lawyers will be loath to touch anything which does not have a clear rights status, and the concept of fair use is murky and can only be proven once a judge has ruled as such, so most companies will just not take the risk.
For a real-life example posted here recently, a scholar on Shel Silverstein's work was forbidden by his estate to quote anything of his. [0]
> it forbade me not only from reproducing images for this one article, but from ever reproducing any of Silverstein’s work—song lyrics, poems, images, whatever—in any context. Ever.
This is what he had to say on how fair use played into the situation:
> You may have heard of something called “fair use.” One would think fair use was custom built to protect scholars and artists who want or need to reproduce excerpts from copyrighted work in the service of education or art or scholarship—and one would be right. But whether we’re protected or not, most presses prefer to play it safe and make scholars request permission.
These institutions that preserve films also have donors and institutions they are beholden to for funding. Claiming fair use won't protect you from a massive and costly court case from a Hollywood juggernaut's top lawyers. Film studios especially have an incentive to litigate against work like this because a lot of their back catalog has become relevant and profitable to re-release since people have gotten into classic films and the associated works.
One thing I’ve never understood about the whole Disney/Mickey Mouse discussion is Trademark doesn't expire.
If Disney can hold a trademark on Mickey Mouse, all the old movies could enter the public domain but you still wouldn’t have a right to make your own Mickey Mouse movies or t-shirts.
So it seems what they are really trying to protect is Fantasia or whatever. Specific movies. Not iconic characters.
I still wonder how much faster parts of the world who do not honor the traditional IP laws can innovate? Not that I'm encouraging ignorance of IP laws, just curious about what happens differently in their absence... how does the system work then?
Ignorance of IP laws would help the developing economy, while hurting the developed economy. Copying is cheap, original invention is expensive, and developed countries have more to lose.
In a somewhat relevant WTO dispute between US and China,
"The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a coalition of U.S. entertainment and software industry groups, has claimed piracy in China costs them more than $3.7 billion in lost sales." [1]
Also I think it's an absurd argument that just because someone pirated your content that they would necessarily buy it. A lot of content is pirated specifically because they think it's not worth buying.
Mickey is trademarked. Old Mickey Mouse movies, like Steamboat Willie, will be free to copy and distribute but I don’t think other people will be permitted to produce new works starting Mickey Mouse.
It’s a bit of a legal gray area. I don’t think anyone has settled the question about whether trademarking characters runs afoul of the constitutional prohibition on perpetual copyright.
Based on how much money Disney has put into absorbing every trademarked franchise ever (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.), it seems like they’re willing to bet on those trademarks being enforceable.
Sherlock Holmes is also a grey area. My understanding is that the original Sherlock Holmes stories written by Conan Doyle are public domain, but not Holmes material written at a later date [1]
Yes, they can and they have. You can search for articles on Disney suing people in places like China for selling or featuring images of Mickey Mouse (or lookalikes).
A perverse effect (I think) of trademarks is that the owner of a trademark has to sue to protect it from infringement: otherwise, it becomes a common mark, not a trademark, and is usable by anybody.
The copyright mess is another example of how corporations have sucked the life out of America. Disney (and others) lobbying for that law is perhaps the definitive example of regulatory capture and how it has an affect on all of us. It makes citizens cynical, breeds distrust in our (wholly bought) government, and it illustrates how tyranny can arrive from any direction, not just the expected ones.
You know why patents and drugs have short terms, but copyright is very long?
Because the thing it is protecting is a luxury. It is unnecessary. No one will die if Mickey Mouse remains copyrighted in perpetuity, and the progress of humanity won't be stunned because you can't make youtube clips out of Winnie the Pooh.
You can just stop buying Disney merchandise if you don't like them. There is more public domain art than you can consume in a hundred years. Disney will stop lobing for copyright extensions once it no longer profitable.
The concept of "Public Domain" sounds absolutely bonkers to me. You own something and then suddenly you no longer own it. It would be like if you woke up one day to see a family of squatters living in your house, that you can't get rid of, because the person who built your house died 70 years ago and your house is now "Public Domain".
We should just get rid of the public domain exception and recognise intellectual property as normal everyday property, not something that can magically becomes ownerless one day. Communism has been tried and it doesn't work. Let's not repeat the mistakes of the past.
On the other hand, I do hear the plight of preservationists &c. There should be a lot more rights granted to people to use copies of other people's property. For starters, all non-commercial use should be allowed, so that old movies could be digitised and stored in better formats. After all, the studio doesn't own the tape or the DVD that contains the movie, it owns the movie itself and the type of media it's stored on shouldn't matter. This probably would also mean that noncommercial free peer-to-peer filesharing would also be legal, but honestly, if you can't compete with torrent sites, which blast thirty porn popups and show you a dozen false download links, your business probably deserves to die.
> It would be like if you woke up one day to see a family of squatters living in your house, that you can't get rid of, because the person who built your house died 70 years ago and your house is now "Public Domain".
> sounds absolutely bonkers to me. You own something and then suddenly you no longer own it.
The fact that companies can own IDEAS don't sound bonkers to you? We should begin the conversation at that, not at the fact that the owning of ideas expires after some time.
> It would be like if you woke up one day to see a family of squatters living in your house
It's definitely nothing like that. A proper analogy would be saying you woke up one day to see someone else has the permission to copy (and sell copies of) your house. While you might not like it, it doesn't take away things you already have.
Not having the public domain is what is bonkers. Can you imagine if Shakespeare was prevented from writing Romeo and Juliet because of the copyright on Luigi da Porta's Romeo and Giuletta or if he couldn't write The Merchant of Venice because of the copyright on Il Pecorone? That is the world that our copyright laws are now creating.
If you're a company like Disney, renewing certain properties should really make you think after it starts to cut into the balance sheet. Most works wouldn't generate enough revenue to justify the renewal and would fall into the public domain. Disney wouldn't be holding thousands of unrelated works hostage.