Title.
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?
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.
Yes.
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
I am in favour of that.
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
It should return to the original design: 14 years from creation, and then 14 more years if requested and paid for.
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.
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.
Like if an author had a five year old why shouldn’t the kid get royalties if their parents is in an accident?
Like I said, all it does is prioritize the desires of the dead over the needs of the living. It’s not justified.
In this example, the child is living, and has needs.
In the perfect world, the kids should have UBI regardless on if their parents are authors. But yes the kids should be inheriting the remainder of the fixed-term copyright.
So you would rather the publisher make the money instead of giving it to the family of the artist for a short period of time.
What terrible priorities.
Why should the benefits of my labor not pass on to my children just because it’s a creative work?
Because the benefits of labour don’t pass on to your children, period?
Maybe there’s something out there I’m unaware of, but I don’t understand the implication in your question.
Inheritance
That’s not «the benefits of labour» being passed on to your children, is it? That’s what you own being passed on to your children… And it’s taxed! Maybe it would be a good idea to have taxes on inherited IP, though. Then again, if the taxes are at or above 50% then wouldn’t that mean that the state would inherit control over the IP, hence making it public domain? Meh. That would be an estate tax rather than an inheritance tax, technically, I think. How would you pay taxes on inheriting an IP?
You own copyright the same way you own a piece of paper that says you own a house. Someone who made a lot of money in a short time from their labor can pass on the rest to their children. Copyright spreads out the income over time by allowing exclusive income on ideas for a limited period of time. It is what allows a musician to make money from their songs without needing someone to directly pay them for writing fhe song at the time it was made.
Copyright as a concept is not horrible when applied to exclusive distribution for a short period of time, and that time period shouldn’t arbitrary end on death any more than someone should lose the house their family lives in because the person whose name is ok the deed died in an accident.
It just needs to be far shorter and companies should be changed so that the way people and companies use it. Otherwise every person would create a company, give it the Copyright, and then fhe company could be i herited.
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.
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.
Would have made all of Disney and Universal’s IP buy-ups over the last decade+ a lot more interesting.
(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.
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.
Copywriting is typically fine for a company though I thought
Copyright, even if signed away to a company, is still timed off the original creator’s lifespan.
