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https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
Research by mathematician Rufus Pollock in 2009 pegged optimal copyright length at 15 years, regardless of time of authorial death. So if I copyrighted something at 30, I would lose the copyright automatically at 45, even if I lived to 90.
So glad to see another reference to this guy's work in the wild.
As an amusing side note, the original term of copyright in the first law that established it (the British Copyright Act of 1710) was a flat 14 years, with a mechanism that allowed you to apply for only one extension of an additional 14 years. So most things would be 14 years, and whatever select things were particularly valuable or important could have 28 years. Under Pollock's analysis this is just about the perfect possible system. So by sheer coincidence this is something that we got right the first time and ever since then we've been "correcting" it to be less and less optimal.
HATE when that happens
This estimate is also an overestimate according to the paper.
First, much creative endeavour builds upon the past and an extension of term may make it more difficult or costly do so. Were Shakespeare’s work still in copyright today it is likely that this would substantially restrict the widespread and beneficial adaptation and reuse that currently occurs. However we make no effort to incorporate this into our analysis despite its undoubted importance (it is simply too intractable from a theoretical and empirical perspective to be usefully addressed at present).
This means that the real number is significantly less than 15, maybe more like 12.
Whats the TL;DR on why?
I wish the abstract had information on what factor they're optimizing for when deriving the optimal length.
Should be X years after publication, lifespan should not matter.
A person at age 200 (I mean in the future when they find anti-aging tech) should not be able to gatekeep the stuff they wrote when they were 25.
A person publishing a book at age 30 then dies next day in a car accident should not lose the right to pass on profits made from the book to his/her children.
Copyright should be fixed-length, fuck lifelong copyright, fuck "corporate personhood".
Also this length should be at most 25 years and 10-15 years is better. These 75+ year copyrights are total BS.
10-15 sounds pretty short tbh. It can take years to write a book, and then 10 years later a company can just make a movie out of it and doesn't have to pay you shit for it?
Interesting point. I don't really know what would be fair.
On the one hand you are right, if someone puts in a lot of time and effort to create a book. And it becomes a hit and gets a movie deal, I do believe they should be rewarded for that.
On the other hand, out of the tens of thousands of books written each year how many get turned into a movie? 1 or 2 maybe on average? And how much of the book is in the movie? I've both read Mickey7 and seen Mickey17. And while they both have some things in common, they are basically completely different stories. Should we really compromise the rules for everyone because of this very rare exception?
And I also feel like movies are caught in a slump the past years, with very few original stories being made. All remakes, reboots and super hero crap. If more stories were available for free use, how much would that influence new story creation? Very hard to say really.
As with all art, nothing is made in a vacuum. Everything builds on each other, everything is influenced by other things. I can't help but thing about what the community did with 3D printing once the patents expired. Having stuff available to use can only be a good thing right?
But I don't really know, you make a very good point. In a world where all kinds of art gets devalued all the time, I feel like we should celebrate artists and the art they make. I like to fuck around with creating my own art in my free time and have made stuff for friend and family. Even sold series of hundreds of units in the past. But it's not my day job and I consider myself an absolute amateur. Maybe if UBI was a thing, it would be the thing I put most of my time into.
I hate our world revolves around money and capitalism. It leads to difficult situations like this one, where copyright holds us back and mostly benefits large mega corps. But on the other hand, we must support artists for everything they do.
They shouldn't need to inherit anything wealth from their parents. We are playing wackamole instead of just building a better system than the current obviously flawed models that we all.... Inherited. Ironic
Yeah why do I keep inheriting the sins of my forefathers. I didn't do shit.
Bigtech would hire hitmen to go after PhD students
Could be incentive to murder content creators.
You should separate the art from the artist.
I cannot do it when the artist is using the money to hurt people.
Just give me a moment
Breaking news, popular book series enter public domain as the author was Luigied last night.
Separate the art from the artist with extreme prejudice
Plot: a rival publisher hires a killer to murder a successful author over the copyright.
I was just thinking about that. If the copyright is tied to the author being alive, that’s essentially putting a huge target on your back. People have mysteriously died for much less than that.
I am in favour of that.
I'm all in favor of shortening copyright length, but it shouldn't be tied to a creator's lifespan. It's too variable, and it doesn't make sense for anything that more than one person worked on.
I think a reasonable compromise would be 20 years default, after which point you could apply for a 5 year extension twice. Extensions will only be granted if the work is still being made accessible, either new physical copies are being printed or digital distribution is available.
But I would also include a clause that if a work is no longer accessible, such as being pulled from streaming services, an online game being shut down, software not updated to be compatible with modern platforms, etc, copyright is considered to be in a weaker state where end users are permitted to pirate it for noncommercial purposes.
I would shorten the initial term to 15 years instead but keep everything else the same, if the author can't be bothered to even file for an extension then they probably aren't earning money from the thing anyway. See below for why 15.
That's fine, the exact number isn't really important. I kind of went for an intentional highball to pitch this as a closer compromise to how long copyright currently lasts.
It should return to the original design: 14 years from creation, and then 14 more years if requested and paid for.
That is the BARE MINIMUM of reason.
There's no reason IN THE WORLD for any kind of idea of "intellectual property" to exist once the creator is dead.
NONE.
It doesn't benefit the creator in any way to have such a system where people can claim ownership of another's work after death. All that does is deny the living things that could help them in favor of some ridiculous notion that you're helping the dead; it's asinine.
Minor children of artists benefitting from their parents work is one possible reason. Like if an author had a five year old why shouldn't the kid get royalties if their parents is in an accident?
It should be short enough that the child of an artist shouldn't be benefitting for decades, but there are cases where an untimely death would screw over the artist's family and allow the publisher to make all the money themselves.
The current setup is awful, but there should be at least a period of time after their death for rights to be inherited that is no longer or possibly shorter, than a reasonable time frame like a decade or two.
Why should the benefits of my labor not pass on to my children just because it's a creative work?
Headline from the past: Sadly, our beloved Walt Disney died yesterday after apparent suicide by 20 knife stabs to the back.
I think it's a great idea. Their descendants can inherit any proceeds from their life, rather than the ownership of the copyright.
Well, we need to figure out how to kill companies first. They own the copyright in the situations you would care about.
So, it kind of already works that way. If the company dies, no one is gonna come after you. Unless it was sold of to another company, that is.
It is always sold to another company. If a company is "destroyed" - eg, they must declare bankruptcy - then their assets will be sold off to pay back their debts. IP counts as an asset, so it would be sold to another company. It would not simply enter the public domain.
Meanwhile, you probably don't want to kill all companies. Your friendly neighborhood taco truck is, after all, a company.
Bad. Copyright needs to be reformed, but this would be more likely to put money into the hands of rich people and corporations.
Imagine that I've just released a book series that's more popular than Harry Potter and LOTR combined, and I get hit by a bus. What's then stopping Disney or Warner Brothers etc from producing a set of movies with all the associated merch, and making a shit load of money, with not a penny going to my family? Not even giving them the opportunity to make enough to live on, never mind getting rich?
In that situation, depending on the contract, the publisher could even pulp the existing books and release identical copies without paying me or my family.
Would have made all of Disney and Universal's IP buy-ups over the last decade+ a lot more interesting.
It should be held by government and every company that makes money out of copyrighted material should pay it in taxes and authors should get money from government as long as they live. It can be steam % so 70% author 30% government. When author dies government gets 50% children gets 50% after that grand children 30% and then back to 0%.
This way each country would benefit from their brightest minds now it's just foreign corporations benefit from everything.
Honestly we need to make inheritance an obsolete custom. Keep personal items, but wealth should not be transferred
Define "death".
For a book? There is very much an argument that the listed author would make sense. But... good authors tend to have ten or twenty solid pages of thanking their editors and beta readers and researchers and partners and so forth for very good reason. And while they tend to not get royalties (outside of the partner), those associated with the publisher sort of do in the sense of getting a continued paycheck in part because of their demonstrated "value".
But let's bump that up to a movie. Is the screenwriter the creator? What about a case where there were multiple "script doctors" brought in to punch up a premise? The director? The lead actor? The ridiculously good performance by the supporting actress that held every scene together? The people in the editing bay who turned "I want this scene to pop more" into actionable edits? The VFX team who did the entirety of every action sequence and half the dialogue because the costumes weren't finalized until a week before it hit theatres?
And so forth. The time where works tended to have a singular creator was... closer to millennia ago than not. Even a lot of the "Willy Shakespeare was a fraud" is rooted in a misunderstanding of what editing and collaboration is.
I don't know what a good model is. I like the concept of a fixed period with the idea that if you are continuing to use an IP then people will pay for the new stuff. Then I look at all the cash-in horror slop because Winnie the Pooh became public domain and... does that help ANYBODY?
My mind keeps coming back to the end of Sebastien de Castell's Spellslinger series. He left a LOT of loose ends (in part because of the themes of the story he was telling which would be spoilers to elaborate on) but did a quick epilogue sequence of two characters reuniting. And then he wrote an afterward where he talked about how (paraphrasing) that is just one possible ending and that it doesn't actually matter what he wrote because, after the years we all spent reading about Kellen and Reichis and Ferius and Nephenia and Shalla... they aren't just his characters. They are OUR characters too. And what he can see as a potential future isn't necessarily what we see. I forget if he explicitly said writing fanfiction was a good idea but... that is kind of the reality of it.
And in that sense? I increasingly come down on: Let the companies and creators keep their IPs. Only they get to profit. But also heavily strengthen fair use so long as there is no direct profit (we do need to understand the idea of ad revenue for a youtube channel or a website or something). Fill up AO3 with ALL the good slop but keep it out of theatres unless they are gonna file the mormon off and Fifty Shades of Grey it. Beyond that? Whatever.
And just for those wondering what those themes were:
Spellslinger series spoilers
A huge part of the series, and de Castell's writing in general, is the idea that the viewpoint character isn't the main character. Yeah, Kellen Argos is a really cool con-man with limited casting capability who does heroic stuff. But there is little he can do against the horrors of the world other than to inspire, and force the hand of, those who can. And, in turn, he is inspired by those he loves. Kellen isn't Frodo or Aragorn. He is Eowyn and Faramir.
Limit copyright to 5 years.
Abolish patents entirely.
Greed and selfishness are unacceptable foundations for any society.
Rich bastards would still fuck it up.
The guy who invented insulin made it free for all rather then patenting it because it’s literally a life saving medication.
How’s that going in the US?
Those insulin are still available at $25 a vial, no prescription, no insursnce. But those are not the newer fast-acting ones and (I'm not an expert on this) are supposedly less effective than the more modern insulin.
That's how it used to be. It only became a problem when it stopped being an individual who owned rhe copyright and instead was owned by a corporation.
Now corporations are treated as people, so this change would only make it worse for the little guys.
Copyright is only here because of capitalism, omce we get rid of this toxic system, copyright is simply bot required to better humanity
I very much agree that copyright is a tool to protect the wealth of the rich.
But I think the idea of restricting access to knowledge in order to benefit a select few predates capitalism. The ancient Chinese state iron and salt monopoly is the first example that comes to mind, some Greek mystery cults probably count too, even if we don't think of that knowledge as beneficial now.
I'd guess it's a common feature of strongly elite-dominated societies, of which capitalism is just the current model.
I know this is irrelevant, but what system do you prefer. Not asking in bad faith, I agree, just curious what your alternative is because I don't know what mine would be.
(From a US perspective) It would be good. As an analog, take a look at patents, the surge in 3d printer tech is because the patents expired. The idea is a "limited exclusivity", the permanent nature it has become is stagnating, and only there to benefit the corporate rather than personal nature that the system was designed for.