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.
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.