askBeehaw: should copyright even exist at all? and if it should, how long should the ideal term of copyright be?
askBeehaw: should copyright even exist at all? and if it should, how long should the ideal term of copyright be?
a perennial favorite topic of debate. sound off in the replies.
As a published author, I'm glad copyright existed. Without it, none of my publishers would have been in business and I would have had to find some other income source. But I think the default should be "public domain" rather than "copyright", and I'm skeptical of allowing corporations to own the copyright to individuals' works.
My biggest frustration with copyright is in situations when the item is out of print or rights owned by an entity that has dissolved. There really should be a way to republish such works without waiting many decades for it to be in public domain.
I think -- copyright should apply to humans only and be non-transferable from the original artist except in cases of death. Grant copyright to individuals or joint copyright with groups with fractional right for 7 years if the work is distributed, 1 year if not. Legal entities cannot own any copyright at all.
I think somewhere in the ballpark of 10-20 years is probably enough to reward creators. Anything significantly longer than that, and it just incentivizes them to milk their creations forever, and punishes other creators who might otherwise make novel derivative works.
I am also of the belief that intellectual property in general (copyrights and patents) should be subject to eminent domain in the same way that physical private property is, i.e. it should be possible to force the creator to sell it to the public (with fair compensation) in cases where it would be an invaluable public good.
It's a good idea to know the history of US copyright before answering this question.
As far as my answer, maybe 10 years. Even then, all content is remixed and remastered, so I don't really see a point to copyrights at all. Anything that relies on copyright are a part of incredibly incredibly oversaturated industries, so people should just make what they are passionate about, and not worry about whether some dude decides to rip it off to create some other thing. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. Jazz musicians certainly don't give a shit, and people have been stealing the Amen Break for decades.
People are too damn concerned over trying to be rich and famous from whatever idea they foolishly think is unique. Every melody has essentially already been created, and if it hasn't, then AI and LLMs will take care of the rest. Create art because you like to create art.
The problem is the work-to-live death spiral. Install UBI and abolish copyright.
Fun topic! Copyrights have their place in society even now. However, I say it should be a fixed 20 to 30 years MAXIMUM. That should be enough time for people to commercialize and profit for the original creator or organization. Anything beyond that just starts getting ridiculous.
As a hobby artist, I think copyright should exist to protect individual artists commercial rights. Whether I sell my work or not, should be up to me. On the other hand, we should not punish people for finding inspiration in other people's works or using them as wallpapers, and usually we don't.
It should not be legal for H&M to scrape Artstation or Deviantart for images to print on their T-shirts, not even if 20 years have passed since it was posted. If they want to use an image, they should have to contact the artist and get permission first.
I think works owned by corporations is a different beast. Corporations should also be allowed to profit of their works, but I don't think they should be able to hold copyrights as a default. Copyright should protect those who make art, not those who commission art.
I don't have a clear answer, but it's really interesting to look at places like Shenzhen in China where copyright is largely ignored. The tech industry there is booming with competition, and good ideas are adopted (or stolen depending on how you look at it) quickly between products. In many ways it seems better for the consumer.
Edit: I might be muddying the waters here between copyright and patents, but it seemed relevant to bring up anyway given the discussion of capitalism.
Copyright is essential. Without it, it would be nearly impossible for most creators to make a profit or even recoup their investment. Some other companies would just reproduce the finished good and sell it for less due to having fewer expenses. And while some may argue "people who want to support the creator will buy the official source" but the point is, without copyright, it will be almost impossible to know what is the official version and what isn't.
For example, books. The official first release has to pay for the time the author spent writing the book, it has to pay for the editors working on it, they have to pay for an artist to create cover art or any other illustrations used, they have to pay for advertisements, and finally the distribution. Someone else can just copy the finished work and then just have to pay for distribution. A person buying the book would have no chance of knowing which book is the original one because the books are identical. If Trademarks are still a thing there might be a different company name on the book but it would take a lot of effort for consumers to figure out which is the original.
Same with any kind of software. Someone has to pay for the time spent by the programmers, the designers, the person coming up with the ideas, and all other people involved in getting the program finished. Without copyright, someone else can just create a somewhat official-looking site and sell the product for slightly less. Mark it "On-Sale" and people wouldn't even be able to tell from the price whether the product is "official" or not.
We can get rid of copyright once the need for work is eliminated. If all of our basic needs are taken care of regardless of what we do, then creating art can entirely turn into something done out of passion. It could be achieved by implementing a UBI or however else the need for work/money is eliminated.
I agree that the current time of 70 years or the life of the author+70 years is too long and unnecessary though. A reduction to 20-30 years should be sufficient. Especially since trademark law can extend that. I don't think the moral argument of an author having control over how their creation is supposed to be used holds up.
I'm too content with copyleft licenses like the GPL and Creative Commons to ever want to go back to anything more restrictive.
I prefer a flat time period not in excess of a single lifetime. So, like, 20 years.
Reason being: if an old person invents something (presumably) to benefit his family and immediately dies, I think it’s fair to give the kids time to benefit from it.
Shouldn’t be too long, though, since it shouldn’t have a multigenerational effect. As in, it shouldn’t benefit him during his lifetime AND his kids during theirs.
Existing beyond death seems too exploitative for my liking. But also, what do people think about trademarks and patents.
Maybe I’m just naive, but I feel like it doesn’t really make sense particularly in the internet era. I can understand the argument that patents and copyright can allow people to profit off of their ideas and all, and maybe it would actually discourage anybody from making anything otherwise… But I just don’t really buy that? It seems like patents and rights often end up being held by large corporations instead of creators anyway, and they have incentive to iterate anyway? I dunno.
But in some sense copyright and patents only benefit the owner of them and everybody else suffers as a result. Technically speaking it’s better if everybody can have free access to books and knowledge and works of art, and it’s beneficial for everybody in society if anybody can create things based on other designs and works. Like I don’t really benefit at all from E-ink having patents which stifles innovation in the field just so that they can turn a profit for years before anybody else can… Maybe you can argue that they wouldn’t have invented it unless they were incentivized by being able to weaponize the legal system as a result of their patent findings, but I kind of doubt that… They’d still have a good product that people would want anyway? Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but it seems a huge shame that we can’t imagine that humans would want to create and better the lives of ourselves and others without profit motives, you know? It’d be nice if we could just support each other and work on making cool and better things.
I think copyright is most valuable as a tool to protect someone's work from plagiarism. Preventing others from copying your work without attribution is a good thing. Using copyright to block the derivative or transformative work others make is counterproductive. I like the phrase "rising tides lifts all boats".
I think rules on fair use should be far more forgiving than they currently are. You should be able to protect complete concepts, like a unique character, setting, or story, but you can't stop others from modifying or being inspired by someone's ideas.
I also think corporations or private entities should never be able to own copyright. Copyright must be owned by a person or a group of people (the makers/authors). Ownership of copyright shouldn't be able to be transferable, but you can give permission to use the copyright like a normal license or contract would. That means copyright ends when the last owner does, and the work enters public domain.
Edit corrected with attribution to without attribution
I'm clearly not an expert in the matter and perhaps this is just my wishful? thinking.
I feel like any type of scientific knowledge humanity has acquired shouldn't be "owned" by any individual / entity and subsequently only benefit an -often small- portion of society. For example, it baffles me how some medications take years and years -usually until the patents expire- to become available to the majority of the patients that need them. I get that companies need a return on their investments. But imo that should never come at the cost of any person's life or health. Like, aside from production costs, the costs of researching a given drug are fixed. So, it's not like the more people that use it takes money out of their pockets somehow. Logically, it should be the other way around.
Idk, it just doesn't make sense to me when the knowledge already exists and people aren't able to make use of it until much later because apparently that's the only way someone's able to make a profit in this current system? Maybe copyright sucks?
What do y'all think?
Edit: I was just made aware from reading the other comments that patents / copyright are actually two distinct forms of IP that serve different purposes. So yeah, definitely not an expert. Not deleting bc I still stand by what I said, but my comment doesn't really answer the question at hand.
Copyright and patents: 10-20 years maximum, depending on the industry. Trademarks should be forever, because that kinda defeats the point of a trademark if it expires.
Let me give an example I understand personally: Rubik's cubes. Rubik's cubes were invented by Ernő Rubik, and gained widespread popularity in the early 80s. In 1982 there was a speed solving competition, where Minh Thai got the world record fastest solve at 22.95 seconds. After this, the "craze" died out and it lost much popularity. Ideal Toy Corp sold the puzzle and retained a patent on it until 2000, after which was the second cubing craze. Sales doubled between 2001 and 2003, and the speed solving competitions came back. This time, however, solvers were not buying the stiff, clunky, catchy, sandy "Rubik's Cubes", they were at first appearing to be buying Chinese "knock-offs", brands which quickly developed recognition and brand loyalty among speed solvers. They were designed for speed, they had looser springs, less plastic, but "torpedoes" to keep them in place under other pieces, and cut out corners to allow imprecise movement. You can buy a better cube than the Rubik's Cube for less money than a Rubik's Cube. You can buy 10 speed cubes for the price of one Rubik's Brand speed cube, their failed attempt at capitalizing on the market. Rubik's Brand has spent the entire time up until very recently not interacting with the rest of the community, trying to sue companies out of selling their products.
I would say 10-15 years max. If you can't make a profit within that amount of time you are unlikely to ever make a profit. Hell, even that long is probably too long.
Abandoned IP should automatically end the copyright. If I can't buy it new from an authorized seller, then I should be able to get it somewhere else without issue.
Copyright is odd, if I make a hammer then the person who buys it can hammer away making things they can sell for profit, modify the hammer, make another similar one or give it away or rent it out without any restriction. But I might have patent on the design and I might have copyright on the logo.
If I make a film of me making the hammer then copyright applies and even if they buy the film from me they can’t do with it what they want and probably have to pay me more to show it.
What I’m saying is that I think we need to rethink and simplify copyright. It’s simply not right that children couldnt (up to 2015) sing Happy Birthday at a party without paying the rights holder for the tune.
I think the value that has been produced by a single IP should be a trigger for passing into the public domain, not just elapsed time
I'd go with the following:
- Everything is CC-BY by default, copyright is opt-in.
- If someone opts in to copyright, it ends whenever they die (I'm going to be nice and say "until the last person dies" for a group project).
I hate copyright, but understand that some people really want to keep their work for themselves. Maybe they can do that - in a world where copyrighting isn't default, we'd have so much to choose from that we wouldn't need the content made by the kind of people who decide to prevent sharing their work.
10 years by default, then you can apply for up to two 5 year extensions. Extensions should only be granted if the work is still being made available (as in physical copies still being printed, digital copies still being sold, streaming available, software compatible with current platforms, etc), if it's abandoned you can't retain copyright just to not publish it.
Copyright should protect the artist, not corporations. But it's become a business, with companies made only for the sole purpose of (sometimes falsely) claim copyright of works.
We can see this with videos being copyright strike when they were making clear use of "fair use", or when some years ago there was an issue with channels about Classical Music having their videos taken down for copyright claim coming from a company that alleged to have the rights over different pieces (not the performances, that are protected by copyright), but the piece itself, from different eras/centuries (20th and 21th century compositions are protected by copyright, 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th and 15th century compositions are not)
There also have been cases of an artist/author losing the right to reproduce their own work after getting out of a contract because the publishing house/music company got full right on their work. Sometimes getting to the point that the artist couldn't perform because the music company had the right to the image of the artist.
So, how can copyright be shaped in a way that upholds the right of the artist, but doesn't allow for any kind of corporative abuse to exist?
The Harry Spotter videos proved that copyright should expire after 25 years.
Copyright protection should only apply to people and if they are alive.
We're stifling artistic innovation when copyright is controlled by corporations.
The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total.
It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows.
There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.
In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.
Please don't force me to compete with Big Publishers and their warehouses full of ghost writers. If the copyright expires at 5 years, 10 years, or even 20 years, it doesn't matter; if I get popular, all the big corporations will be watching that clock like a hawk for a time when they can start pumping out a novel a month about my own characters. No individual human can compete with that. At least wait until I die before handing over my worlds, settings, and characters to the megacorporations to squeeze the juice out of.
Every time I try to make money online without "getting a real job" they find some reason to fuck it up and pocket the money without giving me anything. If I'm not allowed to make money without getting a "real job" then I don't see how it's fair anyone else should be able to. This is why I pirate everything and don't do x as a service. I always use open source alternatives when possible. Maybe corporations should get a real job.
I think it should be limited to thirty years at the absolute maximum. In addition, I feel as though copyright should have to be defended. If the copyright holder does not make their copyrighted work available for a certain amount of time, it should fall into public domain.
Copyright should not exist. However, under our current economic system, capitalism, it should exist for a short period of time. Probably about 5-10 years.
Yes. Software developer's perspective: Copyright is needed for open source projects to be able to protect their work. The GPL license and similar ones exist so that Microsoft or Google can't slap a few features on your project and sell it themselves without giving back to the community. If nobody can be a copyright holder for their work, big corporations would jump on the opportunity to eat up small projects for their own benefit, probably while using unpaid artists' music in the background during their sales presentations for them.
It should exist, but be far shorter. The original copyright law in the US was for 14 years, and I'd say that's about right. We can argue about the exact length, but that's a good starting point. In the modern age, that's ample time to profit off of a work, and apparently it was back then, too.
If your movie, for example, hasn't made you any money in the first fourteen years, it's not going to make you anything. The vast majority of people aren't going to see a new movie come out and think "Cool, I'm going to wait fourteen years and watch it for free." A few might, but not a significant amount.
So the downside, lost revenue for creators (or more realistically, the companies employing the creators) is minimal. The upside? Huge amounts of content becomes available for use. From an economic perspective, this will boost productivity far beyond the lost revenue, leading to a net gain. Those clinging to immortal copyrights will hurt, but the economy on the whole will benefit.
There's also the moral argument. Free Mickey, man!
from a certain standpoint I understand wanting to protect your ideas, they are yours you came up with them. but at the same time it can restrict innovation harshly, i think it's bandai namco but they have a copyright on loading screen games in the video games and like Nintendo has a copyright for the d-pad design. it's just too much
In some countries they don't have copyright, but they have author's right.
Author's right is apply to the work and is exclusively the property of the author until the end of times (literary). This right is apply automatically on the idea of the work (it doesn't have to be made flesh).
It's a moral right that make the author the only one to have paternity over the work and the keeper of the work's integrity.
It's also a patrimonial right as the copyright (the one to make money with), which is transferred to the children at death for 70 years.
The good thing with this is : the author is 100% responsible for what becomes of the work. The author have a hudge power. And artists should be held responsible for the things done with their work. The sad thing is authors mostly still behave has if the were exploited by labels and editors. The bad thing is the patrimonial rights should expire at death not 70 years later.
As others have said libre and open source licences are a way to gain that kind of control over the work under copyright laws.
Personally I think copyright has extended into way too many realms that have nothing to do with what most people probably think it's for, like locking out repairs of tractors and cars. It's also gotten rid of many sales where instead of ownership of what you buy it's a restrictive license to use.
I also feel like there's a lot of social questions as to what we want copyright to do for our society. Even today we tend to think of laws to do something beneficial for some part of society, and argue about who should get what benefits and who might lose out with the laws.
Copyright enables large businesses and creation of content. But unlike from the dawn of modern content business through the late 1990s, today even Disney doesn't really make money strictly via copyright in the traditional sense of selling copies of content. No, they make money via streaming subscriptions, and theme parks and hotels etc.
Now let's see what happens if we got rid of copyright. Well, presumably less people would make money selling copies of what they already created. And this presumably would lead to less content, so the argument goes. I actually over the last 15 years have doubted this more and more with youtube, podcasts and streaming which combined with patreon and substack seem to work with rather lesser or free models for people listening. Piracy of content is both easier than ever and yet way more people pay for the various streaming services mostly for convenience and first run access.
But lets grant that some new content isn't made. So what? From a societal POV we have more content already existing and being made than we can handle. If 50% less netflix movies or YouTube channels existed - would that actually hurt society for entertainment or visual art?
Then there's the jobs aspect. I still maintain that currently under copyright the companies want to and are outsourcing to much cheaper locations and eventually will fight to just use AI. I don't think jobs are really saved by copyright.
I also think this method of getting paid is kind of unfair. If you're anything but a creator you by law get paid for doing the job one time. Mechanic? You get paid for the job. Consultant, you get paid for the hours worked. Teacher? You get paid salary. Why is everyone else limited in what they can do and how they can use their property for one special group of jobs? In some ways it's worse than that - think of all the surveillance, court cases, and extra charges to pay for "copy protection" to try and artificially limit what people can do. It's almost like the drug war.
And like the drug war, I don't think it achieves it's stated goal on the face of it. You put in place all these restrictions, try to limit new beneficial technology like VCRs, all to possibly make someone pay you later. There's no guarantee - it's still legal to just not view the content and so not ever pay for it. And for the VAST majority of people - this is what happens. Buyers don't know you and don't want to pay for something they're not interested in. So you end up providing it for "free" anyway just so someone knows you exist. But 99% ends up being the loss leader.
Today, and for a long time now, there are alternatives that have nothing to do with copyright. You tour and sell tickets. You sell merchandise. You use patreon or ads or kickstarter to fund the release up front. I would argue aside from the absolute biggest names, little would change. And even for the big names, they can sell even more tickets or special access, zoom meet and greets or even just "I bought the official release".
Who would maybe be hurt are the big companies twisting copyright in ways that really suck, like forcing you to buy a new whatever because it can't be repaired, or limiting you to expensive and slow dealer fixes. Disney could no longer "lock stuff up in the vault", which is the opposite of what copyright was supposed to accomplish btw.
All this allows is an economically bad monopoly rent seeking. So I would prefer copyright went away, and we drastically limit patents and locked out patent trolling.
I have recently been thinking that copyright and patents should be enforced until the creator made back their money plus a set profit; like 30%. The reason for this is that it makes it similar to physical products which are often sold at cost plus some profit; usually around 20-50% depending on competition.
Doing it this way has some interesting side effects.
- It puts creative production on par with physical production.
- It requires transparent accounting.
- It covers the hard work required to develop something while not giving windfall profits to minor discoveries that just piggyback off the work of others.
- The more that is charged for a protected product, the quicker it enters the public domain. If you needed to keep a copyright for a long time then you wouldn’t charge a lot for it which is still beneficial to the public.
There could be some nuances. I’d imagine that there would be some threshold amount that covers smaller items. Maybe everything is covered for the first $200,000 or so. If one was claiming more than that for R&D then they would have to produce accounting demonstrating that amount. That way smaller creators aren’t necessarily burdened like a large corporation that does R&D for a living would be.
Obviously numbers could be fudged, but it could be set up so that is difficult. Accounting could be adjusted. Perhaps quarterly or yearly reports have to be made on which projects money was spent on. That way there would be a paper trail that would make it harder to pretend like more work was done on something than actually was.
Just a thought.
This interview with Cory Doctorow is super relevant.
He explains how the music labels have used copyrights power to structure the streaming market AGAINST the interested of the artists. I linked to the relevant timestamp (45:30)
Copyright should exist or artists and writers can't avoid having their work stolen by much larger companies.
I think it's worth defining a hard limit for non-person entities to own copyright. That'd mean post a certain limit, game code, artwork, music etc would be free to use. Human-owned copyright should probably be life with a minimum period of average life expectancy, with maybe provisions to allow it to cover your children too? Prevents corporations from waiting until your mum dies in an accident and immediately taking her life's work and using it everywhere.
I always really liked this writeup by a published author on DRM and copyright. I consider it a classic. Seems relevant here.
I don't believe in the concept of "intellectual property" so any laws built around that concept are nonsense to me.
Laws about protecting intellectual property are to me, like laws preventing the poaching of unicorns, they don't make sense because the thing they are built around doesn't exist.
I do think there should be protections against fraud, ie: falsely attributing somebody else's work or not giving due credit. But the idea that a person, group of people, or a company can "own" a concept in the same way somebody owns a shovel or owns a house, that just makes zero sense to me.
It's a fallacy, it's like somebody saying, "I tried to go see Harvard University, but the tour guide just spent hours showing me a bunch of different buildings. I never actually saw Harvard University."
I can understand owning an object, I even understand owning a piece of land to some degree, although that's somewhat dubious IMO. But an idea? It just makes no sense to me.
I'm thinking of a planet right now called "HS-9970 Xagian Prime" where the oceans are all honey and the land is all gingerbread. How do I "own" that idea? What does that even mean?
I came up with the concept in my imagination sure. I'm the person that originated it, I put some kind of labor into it. But it's impossible to steal from me, unlike land, a shovel, etc. Unless you literally went into my brain, removed the idea somehow and placed it into your brain.
Do I have some sort of rights to that idea? What rights though. Rights of ownership with normal property seem to be rooted in some kind of basic violations of person. As in, the only way you can steal my shovel is if you deprive me directly of the ability to use it. Your stealing directly entails me losing the ability to use that thing. Stealing my land entails kicking me off of it by force against my will, depriving me of using it.
But if you "steal" my idea of Xagian Prime, what am I being deprived of? Anything you add to it is your own creation, it follows the same rules as my ideas I came up with. One could argue that you couldn't have come up with your new ideas without starting from mine, but that seems somewhat dubious, and even if true, it's not like my idea of Xagian Prime was 100% original. It required concepts and ideas that other people already came up with too, and we don't see that as "stealing." I still have full access to my ideas of Xagian Prime.
One might argue that I am deprived of potential profit or social gains, but that seems extremely dubious. How am I "owed" potential profit that isn't guaranteed?
It seems to me that the only arguments that are compelling for so called "Intellectual Property" are actually just arguments about fraud. Like it's wrong to claim my idea of Xagian Prime is actually yours and then sell books on it. Sure, but that has nothing to do with property ownership, that is just fraud. That's the same as saying it's wrong to go around pretending I'm selling medicine when actually it's just water with food coloring.
I am open to changing my position, but I've been discussing this for years with folks and I've never heard a compelling argument for the existence of IP. The most compelling arguments I've heard are ones about rights of people to have their work represented in ways they allow. That makes sense, but again, that seems like an argument against fraud, not for IP.
The first 20 years should be free. I think that's a reasonable timeframe for an author to make a reasonable amount of money from a work - or at least to determine if it's worth extending the copyright.
After the initial 20 year period, it should need to be renewed every decade, on an increasingly steep scale. Let's face it - some works can go on making money for a very long time. I think the creators deserve to continue making money off their works if they can, but only if it's really worth it to them, and they're pretty sure that the work will continue to be increasingly profitable. I suggest that the fees to extend the copyright be based on the profits from the work, and should increase with each extension, up to say 80% of the previous decade's profits at 60 years. That way, virtually everything would fall out of copyright by that point, unless the holder was very sure it was going to be incredibly profitable going forward.
I don't think any individual opinion on whether or not copyright should exist is or should be seen to be relevant to anything.
The simple fact of the matter is that the concept exists. We're not going to be able to magically make it disappear, so saying that it shouldn't exist is incoherent at best.
That said, I can certainly see why people want to see it disappear - because it's basically become an easily abused way for rent-seeking scumbags to profit from somebody else's work.
I think the fundamental problem isn't that it exists, but that it's treated as a criminal matter. Up until fairly recently, it was a purely civil matter. Anyone who was so inclined could file suit against someone they believed had infringed on their copyright, and if they could prove that they legitimately had the copyright AND that they had suffered concrete losses, they could collect damages.
However, at the behest of enormous corporations like Disney who bought enough influence to make it happen, copyright was changed into a criminal matter, so the corporations offloaded the cost of enforcement and no longer have any need to prove that they've suffered any actual loss - the purported copyright violation in and of itself is sufficient.
I think that the creator of a work very obviously has a greater right to it than anyone else can possibly have. And the alternative would be to proactively decree that the creator of a work could NOT claim ownership of it and could NOT seek redress for any losses incurred through someone else's unapproved use of their creation, and that, IMO, is unconscionable.
So I support the idea in principle.
But in my perfect world, it would be a wholly civil matter, and the specifics would depend on the specific case. Broadly, I think that the copyright holder should and likely could only seek redress for specific, demonstrable losses.
And briefly, regarding the term, I don't think it should be fixed. I think it should be judged relative to the individual case.
So if, for instance, someone was seeking damages for the unapproved use of a creation that is wholly obsolete and otherwise entirely out of the public eye, they should have a much more difficult time claiming a loss, even if the thing is only, say, five years old. And on the other hand, if the thing in question is something that the creator is still regularly and successfully marketing, they should have an easier time claiming a loss, even if it's, say, 70 years old.
I do think copyright is essential for protecting smaller artists. However, it has been corrupted by big corporations into something to gain complete control over their creations, which is essentially the exact opposite of its purpose. With this in mind, I would propose two changes:
1: Change copyright to only apply for 10 years. Most smaller creators would have a chance to build up a community by that time, and it lessens the amount of time a corporation can maintain a stranglehold on their IPs.
2: Make a clause that allows for derivative works, as long as the source material is credited clearly and at the beginning of the work. This means works like fangames, fanarts, and fanfictions are all fully legal, and don't have to worry about corporate stranglehold, and also benefits smaller creators, as these works can essentially serve as free advertising.
This obviously isn't a perfect solution, but its almost certainly far better than what we have now, and restores copyright back to its original intended purpose.
Maybe 25 years? But there should be an extra provision that the work must remain publicly available for purchase in like form and cost or else the copyright is voided (with a one year grace period to resolve production issues.)
As a photographer, the idea of the copyright system being thrown away is horrifying to me. I've already seen my work appear on book covers and all over the internet with zero compensation for my time, energy, skills, or the money I spent making the images. This stuff happening is already morally shrugged off by society, God knows how bad it would be if it was also legal.
Copyright should be abolished entirely. But a reasonable length if it needs to exist is maybe 20 years. Think about stuff from 20 years ago. Movies like the first matrix, or games like the original super mario bros. These are classics, no longer something the creators rely on for profit, yet shape our culture.
Copyright is used to harm culture for the sake of profit. An absurdly long copyright period can only harm society for the sake of shareholder profits. Ideally, things should enter the public domain at some point, and ideally at a time where the cultural impact can be felt. Anyone who disagrees with this should believe that disney is an illegitimate business, as almost all of their IPs are things originally in the public domain.
If copyright as it is today existed back when disney started, we wouldn't have beloved disney classics.
I think it should exist, however if a copyright holder isn't deriving profit from their copyright and haven't for say 5 or 10 years then it should expire. Patented processes are a whole different thing, but yeah that is where I stand.
im alright with the protection of specific works from copying, but patents can fuck off
'ideas' should not be protected unless there was a reasonable expectation of privacy or compensation
I.E. ideas that were made public without consent or ideas that were part of a sales pitch or something, sure, but the moment that ideas are made public with consent, they should be considered public domain
exclusive right to make something because you happened to be the first one to think of it shouldnt exist, other parties should have the option to directly compete with your product to encourage innovation
also, any trademark law that isnt expressly for consumer protection can fuck off
if i buy a laptop that clearly has the apply logo on it, sure, i should be able to reasonably expect that i am actually buying an apple laptop, with the quality expected of an apple laptop
if im buying a t-shirt with an apple logo on it, or stickers with the apple logo on them, or a phone case with an apple logo on it but that's clearly from a different company there shouldn't be any issue
25 to 45 years seems like plenty for most of the profit of a work. Maybe 5 years with an option to renew it by the author using the copyright with maximum of 50 years or so. That way abandoned IP or works no longer being published can be used sooner but people who have a series or keeps selling a work can keep control of the IP.
The life of the author plus 70 years bs we have now is insane. It use to be 14 years originally then was 28 years for a good while.
Death of the creator, or in the case of a multi-creator work or a corporation (as in the case of TV and film), death of the last living participant in creation. (In the latter case, corporations would try to assign "creator" status to the youngest baby they can get their hands on in the hopes of making the copyright last 70+ years, but there would have to be adjudication to determine actual involvment.)
As a software engineer, well, it would be remarkably difficult for my industry to pay its workers if copyright didn't exist.
Like capitalism in general, I believe copyright is a good thing in moderation. When those who profit from something want ever more, and those who rule let them, that's when things go sour.
As long as copyright is protecting the inventory so that he can make a profit on his work to develop the thing, yes absolutely. 30 years.
That's an interesting question, I'm not happy with the implementation of the copyright nowadays but I haven't the answer of the right implementation. The property over the ideas is not something I like but if you've been working on some IP, would it be fair if other person takes your idea and work and gets benefits using it?
I think copywrite should exist in some form for creative works made by an individual (maybe 20 years with extensions as some series take forever to finish) but for corporations it should be much much shorter or nonexistant. I wonder what would happen if any new groundbreaking tech was automatically public domain. How much more affordable and innovative would everything be?