Comment by echelon
17 hours ago
I really like this subthread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118808
> I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?
I've always been a fan of this, but here's a great detraction:
> I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator. Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010. IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
This is a very solid point. Works sometimes only become popular decades after their initial release.
Perhaps a way to protect individual artists would be to limit the number of copyrights held by a particular entity. The more you aggregate or hold on to, the steeper the cost to maintain the copyright. I'm sure loopholes like "we're a holding company of holding companies" might be invented to counter this, but if we tied this to real people rather than corporations it might work.
Copyrights shouldn't last longer than humans.
I don't think it should be taken as obvious that authors profiting off old works is a deserved right or positive.
Game of Thrones was originally published in 1996, but the more recent books are more recent. I think that GRR Martin's books would be giving him sizeable profit, even if someone else were able to make GoT fanfiction in the same universe, and the GoT TV Series would still have to pay him to use the more recent copyrighted books, not just the settings and characters from the original.
There is already intrinsic value in having written the original work, and that intrinsic value will make you the best person to consult on a TV adaption or make sequels, even if the original work is public domain and in theory anyone could adapt it.
If an author makes something 20 years ago, doesn't build on the universe any more beyond that, and is unable to compete in their own universe they built against other authors once it goes public domain and becomes popular, well, then tough luck for the author.
Let's look at how this works for software: every piece of open-source software out there is something that in theory another company could take and sell as their own. Red Hat Linux is Open Source, so sure anyone can make their own... and yet Red Hat can sell consulting services and new versions of it because they're the only group with proper expertise there.
> limit the number of copyrights held by a particular entity
Entities are unfortunately quite easy to fake and difficult to define in a fool-proof way.
If you can still license copyrights, then holding companies would become the norm. Like, right now LucasArts owns StarWars, and LucasArts is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney, but if we had a limit on how many copyrights an entity can hold, Disney wouldn't acquire LucasArts, and would instead pay for an exclusive copyright license.
It's an interesting discussion. Also, a lot of stuff from the 19th century only became famous after copyright expired (and only sometimes was the author able to profit from this, other times they died in poverty.)
28+28+... might be a better model. I know there's a bunch of decent stuff from the 1990s which will never again have any real economic value, but would be fine for soundtracks or tictoks or MAME or etc.