Comment by betterunix2
19 hours ago
Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
> That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.
The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).
> copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
[citation needed] /s
"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...
"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)
> "Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.
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This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
Among the various options:
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?
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You don't need to motivate people to create. That's a spontaneous move of human beings. Humans were making music and were paintings on walls far before any obsession of legal owning started to haunt their mind.
Crowdfunding. Services like Patreon, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors.
People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.
Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.