As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author.
Even current regime is ridiculous.
0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain.
Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing.
No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.
Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this.
So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years after the first book was published.
First of all, your timeline is off: A Game of Thrones was published in 1996, and the Game of Thrones series premiered in 2011.
Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).
So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?
Even if the timeline in the question is off, do you agree with the premise? If Stephen King puts out a novel in 2026, when should I be able to sell photocopies of the novel without paying royalties. 2027?
Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically.
Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.
This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.
It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.
No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.
Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.
No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.
The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted
Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth.
A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.
> Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied
That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.
If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.
It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.
In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.
I especially like no-permission-needed for commercial use with predetermined royalties. For patents as well.
Another reform notion I heard (IIRC): Require formal renewal of copyrights. $10 fee per year to cover expenses. So Disney can keep their Tug Boat Willie and Mickey Mouse for as long as they like, without borking the rest of society.
My own reform idea: Royalty also paid to the government. For all IP, for all time. To enjoy our govt's subsidies, protection (tort), and adjudication (contracts), you gotta pay.
The aircraft carrier groups, diplomats, intelligence services, and lawyers needed to keep our markets open don't just pay for themselves.
Copyright for nearly everything but software, is primarily a question of "can I reproduce this other person's creative work?". Fair use doctrine is so broad that I think it most everything else falls under most people's accepted "artists deserve to be compensated for their work" gut instinct.
If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of that action.
I would argue that in a digital world, copyright should be inversely scalable to the size of the creator - that is, individual works by independent artists intended for exhibition rather than reproduction should receive more favorable terms than movies or games created by huge conglomerates intended for mass reproduction, licensing, and sale.
Or more simply: if you’re not selling it presently, you don’t get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights are solved, and we can all move on.
One provision of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act [0] (which expired 6 months after passage of the law) allowed next-of-kin to revoke (the sale of) copyrights sold by the author without recourse (by the folks who paid for them). Allegedly, this was added by Disney in order to cut costs hundreds of millions of dollars in a dispute over licensing Winnie The Pooh IP/rights [1].
Expect something similar when the next big author dies; my prediction: JK Rowling.
TBF there's currently a massive perverse incentive in that we want to encourage creators to create, but then allow the successful ones to retire making money from past works.
The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity.
> The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard; but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption amount means that few estates pay any tax.
> Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party.
A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of an untimely death.
> The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a negative signal.
The distinction between author and their estates is fascinating: the stereotype is estates mismanaging the art, but that usually happens because the estates want to be “artistic” themselves.
Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.
JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding your only motivation to create or share anything is the opportunity to extract as much value from society as possible.
This isn't a bad idea. It would prevent the constant recycling of copyrighted works and bias the creative economy towards newer works. It seems the bias is in the other direction at the moment.
Yes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to be published, with the author of those works knowing that they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been incentivized.
If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?
But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.
> If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?
That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then a game development studio made a series of wildly successfully videogames based on his work, which definitely made way more money than his books, to the point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I struggle to imagine how it could be just that the videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him nothing.
It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for free - while a piece of land pays property taxes.
The state isn’t enforcing your rights for free - you still have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself.
The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I fully support copyright enforcement being funded by intellectual property taxes:
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not for copyright... or for any other type of loss.
People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case.
The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some recovery from criminal proceedings.
If a criminal case ever happens, it is a possibility that restitution can be awarded. But generally, if somebody's infringing your copyright and you want to seek damages, you need to bring a civil case yourself. Well over 99% of copyright cases are civil.
> Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that.
But they don’t?
Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding.
Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes.
Sometimes for physical property the police take it and the owner can get it back from them. That much is sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it I would have had to get it from the thief.
> It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little
It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention.
I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes on buildings such as council taxes on houses, specifically to pay for municipal services, but not generally on land.
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital gains on sold real property (this "often" of course varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may pay some if the conditions are right), when selling intellectual property you often (same proviso as before, only inverted) pay capital gains.
IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.
The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of intellectual property, from people who can't afford to pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are willing to pay.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
It's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to fairly value IP.
This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally.
These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
Profits from property sales are often tax as CGT. It's only a select few jurisdictions that don't tax property sales, often with both CGTs and stamp duties.
The difference in how their taxed in the US is certainly not standard globally, nor is it likely to be optimal.
That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact that a piece of property's value can change over time. You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't independently wealthy already you will never be able to become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc. as you will have to declare their value quite low in order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from you for the low value you had to put on it because you couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond what the author could afford and profits from the movies rights and etc.
Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties, nor should it be.
IPR is a form of incentive for creators in service of betterment of the society (it also could be detrimental like Mein Kempf though). On the other hand real estate does not need such extra incentives. Need or greed is enough.
It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not.
Council taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for rubbish collection & etc.
However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.
In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..
(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
They're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs.
Almost all works make all their money in the first five years after creation.
5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us.
Generative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of copyright to society.
There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.
Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.
These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?
What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
A human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are premised on complete misunderstanding.
There is a legally protected right of publicity. You cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their permission.
> There is a legally protected right of publicity.
There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected.
There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though.
Copyright doing what it does best. Killing new works that resemble a bit too much anything under its protection and allowing rentseekers to live off others.
Germany didn't have patent laws in the 1800s. Their economy rapidly industrialized and boomed.
I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things better if they couldn't patent it?
The benefit of patents is that you have to make your patent public. After the patent runs out anybody can reproduce what you patented exactly like your did.
The problem, of course, is that many companies see patents as a way to rent-seek. Establish enough patents in your niche and now nobody can compete with you. This is particularly a problem in the modern world where technological advancements have accelerated so much that a 20 year long patent is an eternity. An entire industry can just die off in that time.
I read "The duration of the U.S. protection for all other works… was for 70 years from the artist’s date of death" and thought wow, did Mondrian really live into the 1960s or so?
Next paragraph: "Mondrian died in 1944. Any of his works subject to a life-plus-70 regime would have entered the public domain" 10 years ago. Who even thought of including that in a legal argument??
Life + 70 has always been an oversimplification, we still haven't even reached 70 years since the introduction of these rules (1973 in the US, in other countries depends on when the US strogarmed them into adopting similar rules).
There's all sorts of quirks for anything published before that rule got standardised more-or-less worldwide, but in general 1930-1945 is still like a legal grey area that can be challenged in court and you should be good to go for anything published before that. And don't get me even started on posthumous publications, that's a whole different can of worms where a family member might claim some contribution (like for example Anne Frank's father), pushing the copyright further to the life of the author + life of that family member + 70.
Do you really think that the whole world is waiting for whatever the US say to make their laws? Spain copyright law is dated 1879: https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-1879-40001 , based on the French _droit d'auteur_ laws of 1700's. About the matter being discused here, read Artículo 6: dead date + 80.
No I do not think it's an original concept of the US, more that it was the US that conditioned many other countries to adopt similar laws as a condition for trade deals / investments.
As a concept it existed in one way or the other pretty much ever since the printing press.
“For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed during the 28th year following publication. Copyright renewal has been automatic since the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992.
For works created before 1978, but not published or registered before 1978, the standard §302 copyright duration of 70 years from the author's death also applies. Prior to 1978, works had to be published or registered to receive copyright protection. Upon the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act (which was January 1, 1978) this requirement was removed and these unpublished, unregistered works received protection. However, Congress intended to provide an incentive for these authors to publish their unpublished works. To provide that incentive, these works, if published before 2003, would not have their protection expire before 2048.”
You quote a section about unpublished work. The painting was published nearly a hundred years ago so the quote isn't relevant. If you think the article is wrong please state how.
I don’t see that. “For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed during the 28th year following publication” may not apply here, but if so, it isn’t because the work was published.
Reminds me of when in my youth I thought it would be a good idea to re-tile my bathroom in the style of a Mondrian. This because I'd found that white, red, green and yellow tiles were available at low cost. Good to know that bathroom is not in breach of copyright now.
We GIVE creators copyright to serve us by encouraging CREATION.
Mondrian died decades ago.
He is not creating any more.
Copyright of his works is not serving us any more.
Copyright should have ended when the balance between encouraging his creation and encouraging others to create based on his works was reached.
i.e. About 5 years after he made the piece.
The US Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyrights with limited scope:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
One could argue that a colored box promotes neither science nor useful arts, and therefore applying any copyright protection at all to this non-useful art is unconstitutional.
Let's just say that one day I found myself in the Tate Gallery with a Mondrian that needed some work... tech consultancy takes you into the most interesting places.
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