Comment by giancarlostoro
4 hours ago
A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CLEARLY fair use, and even gets me to listen to the songs more, but they are stealing all revenue for a fair use video that took a lot of time and money to make to begin with, they are profiting from work they didn't even do. This is silly to me, I'm sure there's loads of other channels and videos out there screwed over by the record industry over 15 second samples from a song... Which should 100% be fair use and not be given to the record labels.
Issue is small streamers have no legal defense.
Edit, adding the channel I am referring to:
20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.
I agree 20 or 25 years should be plenty of time to protect artistic work. No other industry or line of work has anything like that protection. A work published today by 10 year old could stay in protection for nearly 200 years. If that person was to live to 140, theoretically possible with medicine in future.
We do not continue to pay for most things once they are created. Unless they are continuous services. Artistic works should not be any different.
It also solves the issue of potentially not knowing when the author died, with a fixed period (the number isn't so important imo so long as it's sane), a work is out of copyright x years after the first known copy was published.
reduces the ownership hunt problem, as well!
Either that or some exponentially increasing tax so that Disney can keep their vault. (I'm perfectly fine with them keeping it if they pay some proper taxes.)
They pay taxes every time that they make money off Mickey Mouse, regardless of copyright status.
the important thing is that copyright serves the public good, I do not think it currently does, at least not as well as it could
For corporations sure. For individual authors that's certainly not fair. Especially since it makes it easier for corporations to exploit their work without paying them anything.
> If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights
Because there are fundamentally differ concepts and serve different purposes?
But this must then follow for all forms of works, why just books? Every company whose original creator dies must be converted into a public company within 20 years of founder's death for the public benefit as well if that's the case.
If I wrote it, I own the copyright on it, why should I or my future family give away something I worked really hard for? Why do only authors must care about public benefits?
> copyright should just die with the author
That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are.
The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)
> copyright should just die with the author
This makes sense when you’re thinking of a painting or a book.
Who owns the copyright to Windows or MacOS? A corporation. How do you deal with that?
> you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are
Commercial projects are works-for-hire and the copyright is not owned by the person who does the work.
The proposal for the limit of copyright needs to be refined.
In the US, the current rule is:
> For … a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation
If you hire them, then you own the work you paid them to do, no?
Not in every country, and secondly if you're basing it on life of the author then that does't solve corporate copyright unless you tie it to the live of a particular employee.
You could do "life of author or X years, whichever is longer". Or include a period after death.
But you see how the complexities come in.
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Either that or if it didn't work, insurance industry would've created a product that makes it work for commissioned works. Nothing happens in isolation here.
Then just make it the rule that the copyright expires after 30 years or when the author dies, whichever comes last.
I am fine that estate gets to keep rights for whatever period is left. If estate is dissolved ofc rights would also end. So they can't be orphaned. Either someone has them or they are public domain.
Why not just 30 years? Patents get a flat 20.
Not that I'm arguing for 30 per se, just that I don't see what goals of copyright would be advanced more by adding an "or until death" complication.
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This would create incentive to kill people
So does life insurance.. but we still have that.
I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.
So if an 86 year old writes a book they can't copyright it?
This can't work: life expectancy (of humans) can differ more than 30 years around the world, plus there are significant differences between men and women, and corporations - which often own copyright on work for hire - can live in perpetuity.
I would accept that as well, but crank it down to like 62 years since their date of birth, presumably by the time they would retire.
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not really, when copyright disappears, so does the profit motive
sure, you don't have to pay royalties, but any other publisher can now publish too
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What if the copyright is owned by a corporation?