Comment by djoldman
9 days ago
I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.
That said, trademark laws like life of the author + 95 years are absolutely absurd. The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property. The reasoning being that if you don't allow people to exclude 3rd party copying, then the primary party will assumedly not receive compensation for their creation and they'll never create.
Even in the case where the above is assumed true, the length of time that a protection should be afforded should be no more than the length of time necessary to ensure that creators create.
There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.
For that matter, this argument extends to other criminal penalties, but that's a whole other subject.
> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property.
That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can.
And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince the average person that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing."
This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
>the average person speaks and thinks in these terms,
(Trademarks aside) Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.
If they all go bankrupt today I won't lose any sleep over it.
People also try to make a living selling bananas and apples. Should we create an elaborate scheme for them to make sure they survive? Their product is actually important to have. Why can't they own the exclusive right to sell bananas similarly? If anyone can just sell apples it would hurt their profit.
It is long ago but that is how things use to work. We do still have taxi medallions in some places and all kinds of legalized monopolies like it.
Perhaps there is some sector where it makes sense but I can't think of it.
If you want to make a movie you can just do a crowd funder like Robbert space industry.
> Even more surprising to me is how everyone seems concerned about the studios making enough money?! As if they should make any money at all. As if it is up to us to create a profitable game for them.
Do you want more games (movies, books...)? Then you want studios to make money in that type of game. Because and if they make money they have incentive to do so. Now if you are happy with the number and quality of free games a few hard core people who will do it even if they make nothing then you don't care. However games generally take a lot of effort to create and so by paying people to make them we can ensure people who want to actually have the time - as opposed want to but instead have to spend hours in a field farming for their food.
Now it is true that games often do look alike and many are not worth making and such. However if you want more you need to ensure they make money so it is worth investing.
We can debate how much they should make and how long copyright should be for. However you want them to make money so they make more.
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It's been a US-led project for the benefit of American corporations.
If I was running the trade emergency room in any European state right now, I'd have "stop enforcing US copyright" up there next to "reciprocal tarrifs".
Unfortunately we have a bunch of copyright-friendly groups in EU, so this would only work in the "stop enforcing US copyright in retaliation" sense, but not likely in the "stop enforcing copyright because on the net, it's a scam" sense.
Worked for china
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We were close to your viewpoint being the popular one, but sadly many (most?) independent content creators are so overtaken by fear of AI that they've done a 180. The same people who learned by tracing references to sell fanart of a copyrighted franchise (not complaining, I spend thousands on such things) accuse AI of stealing when it glances at their own work. We're entering a new golden age of creative opportunity and they respond by switching sides to the philosophy of intellectual property championed by Disney and Oracle (except for those companies' ironic use of AI themselves..).
We would prefer a world where we can use the skills we have spent a lifetime honing without having to compete with some asshole taking everything we’ve shared and stuffing it into a machine that spits out soulless clones of our work without any acknowledgment of our existence.
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People aren't motivated by principle so much as they are by self interest.
> we were close
Maybe. In my microcosm even before big AI, 100% of my tech acquaintances were against IP laws, 0% of my art acquaintances were, and authors I know had varied opinions based on their other backgrounds.
Artists do seem to have had a mindset shift. Previously they supported IP protection because it was "right" (or they'd at least concede that in practice it's not helping them personally), but with the AI boom most of them are pro-IP laws because of more visceral livelihood fears.
There's also a moral issue at play: To safeguard the interests of a few publishers (sometimes the creators, but they can easily end up with a shitty deal) you remove freedoms to the entire population to copy the same idea.
You need a central structure funded by everyone's taxes which enforce a contract almost nobody of the infringers has signed.
That's appaling, I hope with this AI wave we'll get rid of copyright all together.
Philosophers were waaaay ahead of this game.
> There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years.
I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.
If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.
The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20.
Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not.
A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.
In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.
> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.
Not so, because of net present value.
The return from investing in normal stocks is ~10%/year, which is to say ~670% over 20 years, because of compounding interest. Another way of saying this is that $1 in 20 years is worth ~$0.15 today. A dollar in 30 years is worth ~$0.05 today. A dollar in 40 years is worth ~$0.02 today. As a result, if a thing generates the same number of dollars every year, the net present value of the first 20 years is significantly more than the net present value of all the years from 20-120 combined, because money now or soon from now is worth so much more than money a long time from now. And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.
The reason corporations lobby for copyright term extensions isn't that they care one bit about extended terms for new works. It's because they don't want the works from decades ago to enter the public domain now, and they're lobbying to make the terms longer retroactively. But all of those works were already created and the original terms were sufficient incentive to cause them to be.
Your analysis misses the incredibly important caveat that revenue rises with inflation – or sometimes even faster.
50 years ago, a movie ticket was 0.50 cents in revenue. Today, it’s $25. That’s a 50x increase… a dollar in 50 years might be worth $0.02 today, but a movie ticket in 50 years is worth about a movie ticket today.
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> And that's assuming the revenue generated would be the same every year forever, when in practice it declines over time.
For the crown jewel IP that the studios are most interested in protecting, the opposite of this assumption is true. Star Wars, for example, is making more money than ever. Streaming revenues will probably invalidate that assumption for an even wider pool of back catalog properties.
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> I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.
That would be fine, if the studios didn't want to have it both ways. They want to retain full copyright control over their "asset", but they also use Hollywood Accounting [1] to both avoid paying taxes and cheat contributors that have profit-sharing agreements.
If studios declare that they made a loss on producing and releasing something to get a tax break, the copyright term for that work should be reduced to 10 years tops.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Next, they'd switch to from Hollywood Accounting to Oilfield Accounting. Oh that wellhead is actually owned by this other company over there, we just purchased their product at a fair market rate while they were still in business, but now it seems that other company is going bankrupt and cannot do the environmental cleanup to even seal the wellhead, much less remove it.
IIRC, of works that bring in any money to their creators, the vast majority is returned, for almost all works, in the first handful of years after creation. Sure. the big names you know have value longer, but those are a miniscule fraction of works.
Make copyright last for a fixed term of 25 years with optional 10-year renewals up to 95 years on an escalating fee schedule (say, $100k for the first decade and doubling every subsequent decade) and people—and studios—would have essentially the same incentive to create as they do now, and most works would get into the public domain far sooner.
Probably be fewer entirely lost works, as well, if you had firmer deposit requirements for works with extended copyrights (using the revenue from the extensions to fund preservation) with other works entering the public domain soon enough that they were less likely to be lost before that happened.
The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies released in 2001, made $887 million in its original theatrical run (on a $93 million budget). It would absolutely still have been made if copyright was only 20 years. And now it would be in the public domain!
The success that we can now measure through hindsight wasn’t assured at the time of greenlighting the film. They took a huge gamble:
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-peter-j...
It would have been an even bigger gamble if they weren’t able to bank on any long term revenue (I’m certain Netflix continues to pay for the rights to stream the trilogy after 2021).
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And the book it is based on would have been written had there been no copyright at all.
For movies in particular the tail is very thin. Only very few 50 year old movies are ever watched. Was any commercial movie ever financed without a view to making a profit in the box office/initial release?
According to Matt Damon (in one of many interviews) a lot of movies were produced with the second revenue stream (vhs/dvd) being part of the calculations, that is why we now get a lot less variety and alternative movies made, that second revenue stream doesn’t exist any more (I assume streaming pays very little in comparison).
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With books it's even worse. Movies might get a trickle of revenue from TV licensing but once a book is out of print (which usually happens very quickly, and most never go into print again), that's it. No more revenue from that book, it continues to circulate in libraries and used bookstores but the author and publisher gets nothing from that.
> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years
Movies for instance make most of their revenue in the 2 week following their release in theater. Beyond, peoole who wanted to see it had already seen it and the others don't care.
I'd argue it's similar for other art form, even for music. The gain at the very end of the copyright lifetime is extremely marginal and doesn't influence spending decision, which is mostly measured on a return basis of at most 10 years.
> If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years
Due to the fairy high cost of capital right now, pretty much anything more than 5 years away is irrelevant. 10 years max, even for insanely high returns on investment.
This line of reasoning doesn't make sense for retroactive lengthening of copyright though, as the author is not gaining anything from that anymore.
Seems to me most of that inflated budget is needed for the entertainment role of films, not the art in them, which a low budget can often stimulate rather than inhibit. In which case nothing of importance would be lost by a drastic shortening of copyright terms.
You are putting a pretty blatant cap on what constitutes "art"...
Lower-budget movies are probably a good thing. Force a return to practical effects instead of CGI.
OK? So we wouldn't have $100m movies, the vast majority of which are forgotten about in a few months. I don't think a $100m movie is ten times better than a $10m one, so I think I'd be fine with movies with much smaller budgets, if they meant that LotR (the books) are now in the public domain for everyone to enjoy.
If movies had a payoff curve like rents, this would be more true, but they're cultural artifacts that decay in relevance precipitously after release, and more permanently after a few decades, where they become "dated", outside a few classics.
Trademark isn't copyright, those are two different things. Trademarks can be renewed roughly every 10 years [1] until the end of time and are about protecting a brand. Now copyright law lasts for "author plus 70 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, the copyright term is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first." [2]
Is copyright too long? Yes. Is it only that long to protect large media companies? Yes. But I would argue that AI companies are pushing the limits of fair use if not violating fair use, which is used as a affirmative defense by the way meaning that AI companies have to go to court to argue what they are doing is okay. They don't just get to wave their hands and say everything is okay because what we're doing is fair use and we get to scrape the world's entire creative output for our own profit.
[1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/trademark-faqs#...
[2] https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
Trademark isn't the same as Registered Trademark either, while we're at it
I agree with your specific point. I think copyright should last for 50 years. That would protect long running franchises like Harry Potter or the Dresden Files but still allow things like Spiderman and Aretha Franklin to be freely reimagined.
However, most of the examples in the article should still be protected. Lara Croft first appeared 29 years ago. Any copyright system should still be protecting IP from 1996.
While I think the laws are broken, I also get why companies fight so hard to defend their IP: it is valuable, and they've built empires around it. But at some point, we have to ask: are we preserving culture or just hoarding it?
Missing is why laws fight so hard too, missing the opposite of what we have (in the west), namely blatant and rampant piracy. The other extreme is really bad, creators of any type pirated by organized crime. There was no video game nor movie market in eastern Europe for example, can't compete against large scale piracy.
Which is to say, preservation without awareness of the threat will look like hoarding. A secondary question is to what extent is that threat real? Without seeing what true rampant piracy looks like, I think it would be easy to be ignorant of the threat.
You're conflating trademark with copyright.
Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works.
So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court asking "how is this not simply laundering someone's likeness through a third party which claims to not have an image / filter / app / artist reproducing my client's likeness?"
All seemingly complicated scams come down to a very basic, obvious, even primitive grift. Someone somewhere in a regulatory capacity is either fooled or paid into accepting that no crime was committed. It's just that simple. This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it. I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley. I think there are legal grounds here to force all of these models to be taken offline.
Additionally, "guardrails" that prevent 1:1 copies of film stills from being reprinted are clearly not only insufficient, they are evidence that the pirates in this case seek to obscure the nature of their piracy. They are the evidence that generative AI is not much more than a copyright laundering scheme, and the obsession with these guardrails is evidence of conspiracy, not some kind of public good.
> So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him?
No, you can't! But it shouldn't be the tool that prohibits this. You are not allowed to use existing images of Harrison Ford for your commercial and you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?
Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's justification for charging money to paint a picture of Harrison Ford to its users?
The justification so far seems to have been loosely based on the idea that derivative artworks are protected as free expression. That argument loses currency if these are not considered derivative but more like highly compressed images in a novel, obfuscated compression format. Layers and layers of neurons holding a copy of Harrison Ford's face is novel, but it's hard to see why it's any different legally than running a JPEG of it through some filters and encoding it in base64. You can't just decode it and use it without attribution.
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> you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?
If the AI prompt was "produce a picture of Micky Mouse", I'd agree with you.
The creators of AI claim their product produces computer-generated images, i.e. generated/created by the computer. Instead it's producing a picture of a real actual person.
If I contract an artist to produce a picture of a person from their imagination, i.e. not a real person, and they produce a picture of Harrison Ford, then yeah I'd say that's on the artist.
Mickey Mouse is a bad example because he's now in the public domain, including Color images.
> This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works.
The thing is though, there is also a human requesting that. The prompt was chosen specifically to get that result on purpose.
The corporate systems are trying to prevent this, but if you use any of the local models, you don't even have to be coy. Ask it for "photo of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones" and what do you expect? That's what it's supposed to do. It does what you tell it to do. If you turn your steering wheel to the left, the car goes to the left. It's just a machine. The driver is the one choosing where to go.
No, I think that's unfair. I, as a user, could very reasonably want a parody or knock-off of Indiana Jones. I could want the spelunky protagonist. It's hard to argue that certain prompts the author put into this could be read any other way. But why does Nintendo get a monopoly on plumbers with red hats?
The way AI is coded and trained pushes it constantly towards a bland-predictable mean, but it doesn't HAVE to be that way.
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Human appearance does not have enough dimensions to make likeness a viable thing to protect; I don't see how you could do that without say banning Elvis impersonators.
That said:
> I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley.
If you're framing the sides like that, it's pretty clear which I'm on. :)
Interesting you should bring that up:
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/1517ldjmv
Loads of lawsuits have been filed by celebrities and their estates over the unauthorized use of their likeness. And in fact, in 2022, Las Vegas banned Elvis impersonators from performing weddings after a threat from the Presley estate's licensing company:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10872855/Elvis-imag...
But there are also a couple key differences between putting on a costume and acting like Elvis, and using a picture of Elvis to sell soap.
One is that a personal artistic performance could be construed as pastiche or parody. But even more importantly, if there's a financial incentive involved in doing that performance, the financial incentive has to be aligned more with the parody than with drawing an association to the original. In other words, dressing up as Elvis as a joke or an act, or even to sing a song and get paid to perform a wedding is one thing if it's a prank, it's another thing if it's a profession, and yet another thing if it's a mass-marketing advertisement that intends for people to seriously believe that Elvis endorsed this soap.
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> This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it
If you have to explain "laundering someone's likeness" to them maybe not, I think it's a frankly bizarre phrase.
Trademarks are very different from copyrights. In general, they never expire as long as the fees are paid in the region, and products bearing the mark are still manufactured. Note, legal firms will usually advise people that one can't camp on Trademarks like other areas of IP law.
For example, Aspirin is known as an adult dose of acetylsalicylic acid by almost every consumer, and is Trademarked to prevent some clandestine chemist in their garage making a similarly branded harmful/ineffective substance that damages the Goodwill Bayer earned with customers over decades of business.
Despite popular entertainment folklore, sustainable businesses actually want consumer goodwill associated with their products and services.
While I agree in many WIPO countries copyright law has essentially degenerated into monetized censorship by removing the proof of fiscal damages criteria (like selling works you don't own.) However, Trademarks ensure your corporate mark or product name is not hijacked in local Markets for questionable purposes.
Every castle needs a moat, but I do kind of want to know more about the presidential "Tesler". lol =)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34
You are missing a bunch of edge cases, and the law is all about edge cases.
An artist who works professionally has family members, family members who are dependent on them.
If they pass young, become popular just before they pass and their extremely popular works are now public domain. Their family sees nothing from their work, that is absolutely being commercialized ( publishing and creation generally spawns two seperate copyrights).
GP's not missing those edge cases; GP recognizes those edge cases are themselves a product of IP laws.
Those laws are effectively attempting to make information behave as physical objects, by giving them simulated "mass" through a rent-seeking structure. The case you describe is where this simulated physical substrate stops behaving like physical substrate, and choice was made to paper over that with extra rules, so that family can inherit and profit from IP of a dead creator, much like they would inherit physical products of a dead craftsman and profit from selling them.
It's a valid question whether or not this is taking things too far, just for the sake of making information conform to rules of markets for physical goods.
If copyright law is reduced to say, 20 years from the date of creation (PLENTY of time for the author to make money), then it's irrelevant if he dies young or lives until 100.
There we stand in agreement. Current copyright law and how it is governed is horrible.
What most people propose is equally bad and will never get traction with lawmakers.
Returning to what came before makes a ton of sense. Just make it X number of years and let's debate X for a while to get a decent number.
You seem to talk about fairness. Copyright law isn't supposed to be fair, it's supposed to benefit society. On one side you have the interest of the public to make use of already created work. On the other side is the financial incentive to create such work in the first place.
So the question to ask is whether the artist would have created the work and published it, even knowing that it isn't an insurance to their family in case of their early death.
I don’t know how much time you’ve spent on task scheduling or public strategy, but minmaxing of The Public Good versus the private benefit of art is, in fact, a question of fairness. It’s a compromise to give both parties as much of what they want or need as possible.
Il not sure IP should be used as a life insurance, there’s already many public and private ideas tools for that.
Also it seems you assume inheritance is a good think. Most people do think the same on a personal level, however when we observes the effect on a society the outcome is concentration of wealth on a minority and barriers for wealth hand change === barriers for "American dream".
For writing many people only become popular after they are dead.
I heard this explained once as the art in some writing is explaining how people feel in a situation that is still too new for many to want to pay to have it illustrated to them. But once the newness has passed, and people understand or want to understand, then they enjoy reading about it.
As a personal example, I could enjoy movies about unrequited love before and long after I experienced it firsthand, but not during or for years after. People may not yet have settled feelings about an event until afterward, and not be willing to “pick at the scab”.
The other, more statistical explanation is that it just takes a lot of attempts to capture an idea or feeling and a longer window of time represents more opportunities to hit upon a winning formula. So it’s easier to capture a time and place afterward than during.
The weirdness there is tying it to someone's life.
For what it's worth, this is a uniquely American view of copyright:
> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property.
In Europe, particularly France, copyright arose for a very different reason: to protect an author's moral rights as the creator of the work. It was seen as immoral to allow someone's work -- their intellectual offspring -- to be meddled with by others without their permission. Your work represents you and your reputation, and for others to redistribute it is an insult to your dignity.
That is why copyrights in Europe started with much longer durations than they did in the United States, and the US has gradually caught up. It is not entirely a Disney effect, but a fundamental difference in the purpose of copyright.
For once, the US had the right idea all along.
That's an interesting perspective, and yes wholly foreign to my very American economics influenced background.
Are the origins the same when looking at other intellectual property like patents?
How did they deal with quoting and/or critiquing other's ideas? Did they allow limited quotation? What about parody and satire?
I'm not sure about other intellectual property rights. I do know there's a similar dichotomy for privacy: Americans tend to view it in terms of property rights (ownership of your image, data, etc.) while Europeans view it as a matter of protecting personal dignity. That leads to different decisions: for instance, there's a famous French case of an artist making a nude sketch of a portrait subject, and being unable to sell the sketch because it violated the subject's privacy rights, despite being the owner of the intellectual property.
Peter Baldwin's Copyright Wars is a good overview of the European vs American attitudes to copyright in general.
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> There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for 1 year past death.
I think life of creator + some reasonable approximation of family members life expectancy would make sense. Content creators do create to ensure their family's security in some cases, I would guess.
You’re thinking of copyright law, not trademark law. Which serves a different function. If you’re going to critique something it’s useful to get your facts right.
>I don't condone or endorse breaking any laws.
Really? Because there are a lot of very stupid laws out there that should absolutely be broken, regularly, flagrantly, by as many people as possible for the sake of making enforcement completely null and pointless. Why write in neutered corporate-speak while commenting on a casual comment thread while also (correctly) pointing out the absurdity of certain laws.
I condone and endorse breaking copyright laws.
this reminds me of the time I tried to use a prepaid lawyer to research some copyright issues
they went down the rabbit hole on trademark laws, which are not only not copyright related, they are an entirely different federal agency at the Patent Office
gave me a giggle and the last time I used cheapo prepaid lawyers
I'd go further and say 10 years from time of creation is probably sufficient.
If the work is popular it will make plenty of money in that time. If it isn't popular, it probably won't make much more money after that.
It is not about trademark laws. It is about where laws apply.
If you torrent a movie right now, you'll be fined in many advanced countries.
But a huge corporation led by a sociopath scrapes the entire internet and builds a product with other people's work ?
Totally fine.
This. It seem the situation is controversial now because of the beloved Studio Ghibli IP, but I want to see the venn diagram of people outrage at this, and the people clamoring for overbearing Disney chatachter protection when the copyright expired and siding with paloworld in the Nintendo lawsuit.
It seem most of the discussion is emotionally loaded, and people lost the plot of both why copyright exists and what copyright protects and are twisting that to protect whatever media they like most.
But one cannot pick and choose where laws apply, and then the better question would be how we plug the gap that let a multibilion Corp get away with distribution at scale and what derivative work and personal use mean in a image generation as a service world, and artist should be very careful in what their wishes are here, because I bet there's a lot of commission work edging on style transfer and personal use.
It was always me and them. They are either "nobel" or just rich. me is the rest of peasants. We pay everything and we give everything to the rich ones. Thats it.
Which huge corporation led by a sociopath? There's so many to choose from.
The wickedest idea that social media run by sociopaths has implanted in the human psyche is the idea that anyone else would take advantage of immoral tactics if they had the means or could afford the payoffs.
I honestly don't see why anyone who isn't JK Rowling should be allowed to coopt her world. I probably feel even more strongly for worlds/characters I like.
Why am I wrong?
New rule: you get to keep your belongings for 20 years and that's it. Then they are taken away. Every dollar you made twenty or more years ago, every asset you acquired, gone.
That oughtta be enough to incentivize people to work and build their wealth.
Anything more than that is unnecessary.
I think you mean "20 years after you die". That seems like a perfectly rational way to deal with people who want to be buried in their gold and jewels in a pyramid.
OK, so you can have your dad's piano for 20 years after he dies, after that it's public property.
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We should never have accepted the term "intellectual property" at all, if this is the mindset it leads to.
Intellectual property does not belong to you. The entire concept of "owning" intellectual property is a very recent thing.
So how about we go back to how it used to be and just remove this entire concept.
You can own things you can't own an idea.
Your copyrighted work just has to be an original expression, not derived from someone else's work. It doesn't have to contain original ideas.
Patents are for ideas. Patents do in fact expire far faster than copyrights in the USA. The main problem with patents is patent trolling in the area of software patents.
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I disagree that you can own things, but I certainly concede IP as a good starting point.
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So every year I go to a swap meet and try to exchange my “expiring” belongings for something similar to reset the clock? Or, they get taken away by force? By someone who has meticulous records of all my stuff?
What problem are you trying to solve?
Ideas are free to replicate. Nothing is taken.