When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms
from the if-they-don't-want-it,-why-must-we-take-it dept
Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to ask permission to re-publish or re-use it in some way.
It turns out that there is another serious issue, related to that of orphan works. It has been revealed by the New York Public Library, drawing on work carried out as a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the US Copyright Office. According to a report on the Vice Web site:
the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.
The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
Since most people today will naturally assume that a book published between 1923 and 1964 is still in copyright, it is unlikely anyone has ever tried to re-publish or re-use material from this period. But this new research shows that the majority of these works are, in fact, already in the public domain, and therefore freely available for anyone to use as they wish.
That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result, huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds, infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda.
The other important lesson to be drawn from this work by the NYPL is that given the choice, the majority of authors didn’t bother renewing their copyrights, presumably because they didn’t feel they needed to. That makes today’s automatic imposition of exaggeratedly-long copyright terms not just unnecessary but also harmful in terms of the potential new works, based on public domain materials, that have been lost as a result of this continuing over-protection.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon or Twitter. Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.
Filed Under: copyright, copyright renewals, copyright terms, libraries, public domain
Comments on “When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms”
You mean antidirt and John Smith were lying about authors demanding copyright terms of life + 70 years and refusing to create content if it was reduced to life + 50 years? I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
Speaking only for myself, but…
If I were more of a creator of…well, anything, really, I’d put basically everything I make into the public domain. Hell, an inverted version of the CCZero icon was my avatar on this site for years.
Re:
I’ve published books and artistic works. Most of my stuff is Creative Commons-licensed, except my books and a small amount of art I spent the most time and effort on. I’ve made almost as much money via donations for Creative Commons-licensed works as I have in payments for sold copies of books and art.
As Cory Doctorow has said, being unknown is a far greater threat to a writer or artist than people not paying to experience your work.
It’s not the creators pushing it so much as the greedy little trolls in the middle.
No surprise there. Copyrighted works generally stop making money after the first few years, and most creators have no desire for copyrights that outlive them. Longer copyright terms exist to protect franchises owned by immortal corporations, which can theoretically go on forever while still remaining profitable.
It’s never been about protecting artists. It’s about making sure Disney can sell Avengers and Star Wars sequels for the next 350 years. In fact, it arguably serves a dual purpose: Longer copyright terms ensure that only the most successful works remain on the market, thus reducing competition as the majority of works inevitably end up orphaned once their owners die or go bankrupt. As I mentioned in another comment, I’ve actually seen people defend perpetual copyright for this exact reason.
Never forget that the optimal copyright term is only 14 years.
Once copyright reached life of the author, lengthening copyright terms any longer really becomes pointless for the original creator. Once upon a time, I actually created music that was freely distributed on multiple file-sharing networks. If copyright was simply 20 years, my earliest works would wall into the public domain in about two years from now. I’d be perfectly fine with that work falling into the public domain.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
Copyright term needs to be as long as is necessary for copyright owners to recoup the money from initial investment. And this needs to happen “on average”. So if there’s huge 90% of works not producing any money for the authors, then copyright’s term needs to be longer. If on the other hand, customers are purchasing these works and authors can get their living expenses covered (again on average), then copyright term can be shorter.
How do you think is copyrighted works selling on the market compared to how much they are being created? Seems tons of works are being created, but markets reject large chunk of the works and go with yet another copy of star wars and pirated copy of titanic.
Re: Re:
Why can’t you stay in your Emotional Support Reality and stop shitting up this site?
Re: Re:
So, 14+14 years, taken straight from the Statute of Anne.
I’d also like to remind the Shame of Finland that most music artistes make most of their money ON TOUR, aka WORKING THEIR ASSES OFF SINGING. Because the record labels would rather profit off the sweat of the artistes’ brows (and the support teams under THEIR hire) than pay the artistes their damn dues under the CURRENT copyright regimes.
Something that even big gaming companies are starting to do, if Mick Gordon is to be believed. (And he SHOULD be believed.)
Re: Re: Re:
The referee from Forget Paris?
Re: Re: Re:2
No, the composer from DOOM (2016), DOOM Eternal and others.
He stated that he didn’t get paid until eight months into production on DOOM Eternal, got blamed for the shoddy quality of the sound mix, and was then offered six-figure hush money.
Re: Re:
If your claim is that copyright lengths are as long as they are in order to recoup living expenses made by authors, extending copyright lengths as they currently are is one of the most useless things you can do.
The law can literally tack on another 30 years of copyright length after you’ve died, and it will do absolutely nothing to give you more money to use when you’re alive. You know… on account of the fact that you’ll be dead during those extra 30 years.
It’s genuinely impressive that we’re at this point to have to explain this to copyright idiots, but that’s why you guys will simp and moan in the name of Prenda Law, the bestest and brightest people in the copyright enforcement industry.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
Your argument fails for one reason. It doesn’t matter who gets the money. If some other people get the money after author is dead, that’s just ok. The main thing is that copyright term length measures the time when society gets their money back from the investment in copyrighted works.
Re: Re: Re:2
You’re using a very different definition of “society” than I’m using, that’s for sure. Are you talking about economics? Because if so, then copyright should last “around 15 years” and no higher than 38 years according to economist Rufus Pollock in 2009. The deal is that society gets the copyrighted works which were locked away by society’s investment of time into an author who did the work of creating it with the help of society, including previous authors. And remember that in the United States, the purpose of copyright is to benefit the public – benefiting authors is a means to an end, if a noble one.
Re: Re: Re:2
If it doesn’t matter who gets the money, what reason do you have to claim living expenses be paid to authors? This entire argument you put forward was based on the idea that authors need money to survive. If you’re now telling me that it doesn’t matter who gets the money, why should I pay you the money now? I can literally point to any money I spend as my payment without you actually getting any of it.
You’re really terrible at thinking things through, I know, but this has to be one of your biggest own goals here. In your desperation to make sure even shitty middlemen like the RIAA get paid for their failure to stop copyright infringement, you’ll even give them your money for it to happen.
Re: Re: Re:3
I think you missed the “average” keyword in the previous messages. We talked about why copyright term needs to be so long, and the only reason is that the society has not yet got their investment to the copyrighted works back from the abyss. This average keyword makes it society’s problem instead of any single person’s problem.
When authors eat food, it leaves a gap of products to the market, and that gap needs to be filled with the work of the authors. But moving products from one person to another is illegal operation, unless you actually move money to the other direction. So now you have explanation of both activities. If these product/money/food flows are not in balance, the whole system will fail at some point because one or more of the items will run out and start causing problems.
Re: Re: Re:4
No, what you’ve described is an absolute nightmare for actual content creators. What you’ve described is a situation where a corporation or middleman can take all the money that would have gone to an author, claiming that it doesn’t matter where a paying customer’s money goes, then tells the author that they can demand for more money (which gets funnelled to the corporation again) or go pound sand. It’s a major reason why a majority of people usually have very little problem with copyright infringement, because you don’t actually bother getting the money to the content creator.
Lending people books, games, and music is entirely legal, and there is nothing you can do about it.
There’s an argument to made that insufficient compensation or payment will lead to societal collapse – which is happening as bosses insist on asses in office seats and not compensating their workers adequately, even during pandemic times. The result is a global labor crisis where companies insist that they can’t hire anyone but also refuse to pay people a fair wage, claiming that a looming recession entitles them to do so. This is not a situation unique to copyright holders, nor does it entitle you to free money from people who have never used Meshpage.
Re: Re: Re:5
There is always alternative to this kind of practices. If companies do not pay fair wage, it’s possible to go independent, and spend your valuable money for food and live with your parent’s basement until you have a product on your own. Once you’ve created a product, you’re well on your way to compete against the companies that invented the horrendous labor practices. If the companies are not taking useful position in the market, the people who got rejected will build a suitable competition to those practices. Once the fruits of that activity start materializing, the companies will have problems competing against the new world order.
It has happened several times already. First it was big industries building steel and paper. Then came large companies building phones and gadgets. Then small companies were competing with developer efficiency. Then open source came and gave away their software. Now next wave is with technologies like meshpage.
Re: Re: Re:6
Based on your own experiences, those plans haven’t exactly panned out as you’d hoped, have they? From your own testimony, it sounds like you have absolutely no problems with using those horrendous labor practices yourself, from the times you’ve demanded that users work for you for free.
Sure, if that’s what you believe. But I’m not holding my breath that any investment in Meshpage will yield a shred of profit. After all, you yourself admitted that Meshpage made you maybe, at best, $58 in 10 years.
Re: Re: Re:7
There’s still over 70 years time to see the fruits of the labor. The copyright duration kinda explains the problem. They didn’t build Rome in 6 days either.
Re: Re: Re:8
Based on your vocal tone and quality in the so-called “tutorials” you filmed, I highly doubt you have those 70 years to recoup “living expenses”. But to start with, there was very little reason to believe Meshpage would make enough money to begin with. Copyright duration, again, will not catapult Meshpage into any form of meaningful relevance.
Re: Re: Re:9
We would just hire some marketing agency like https://videopandas.com/ and let them handle the gritty details of getting it to “look cool” for the customers. Of course opengl technology is unable to do it, so some different pitch is needed.
Are you saying you don’t trust these guys to do good job?
Re: Re: Re:10
Whatever “job” you got them to do, it clearly didn’t help Meshpage. Meshpage doesn’t even feature as a part of their portfolio, and none of the promotional material you’ve made for Meshpage looks like anything Videopandas makes.
Videopandas probably does a good job, but it’s very unlikely they’ve got you as a client. Which is unsurprising, because if you’ve made only $48 over 10 years, you wouldn’t be able to afford their services. Worrying about whether Videopandas can help you or not is moot.
Re: Re: Re:4
What’s so different about eating food when authors instead of non-author workers are the ones eating it? Payment for the food fills the gap. That money goes toward making more food, buying machines, buying vehicles, buying tools, buying home necessities, paying for school, etc. A healthy economy needs circulating money. It also needs people to improve old things and make new ones.
I’m no economist, and I think you aren’t one either. As I mentioned in a different reply, economist Rufus Pollock found that the optimal length of the copyright term is around 15 years “with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years”. Furthermore, you seem assuming that there will be insufficient economic activity around a work after its copyright term expires. You’d be wrong.
The public domain underlies everything: scientific research, medical research, technological advancement, storytelling, government laws, education, and more. Disney’s success depends on the public domain stories (think Aladdin, Snow White, and Mulan) that Disney modifies. Scientific research depends on sharing knowledge between scientists and harnessing past discoveries. Public domain math (math being not copyrightable in the first place) and fictional literature from hundreds of years ago (including Shakespeare’s writing, in particular) form a large chunk of a public school K-12 education.
Essential internet protocols, library software, and programming languages would stall if they didn’t have copyright licenses with far fewer restrictions than usual (MIT license, Apache 2.0, Gnu GPL v2 and v3, etc. or no license). Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia share information under permissive licenses such as CC BY-SA 3.0. Most computers in the world (especially phones, web servers, and supercomputers) run a Linux distribution, the Linux kernel being licensed under the Gnu GPL v2. The internet is as convenient and accessible as it is because it’s built on open standards. The entire digital economy depends on permissive or waived copyright. Think HTML and HTTP.
Meanwhile, fair use is just as important to the economy in general. Schools, libraries, archivists, and every person who uses a search engine depend on fair use for normal operation. And copyright infringement (most videos on YouTube, most fan art, most memes, Sci-Hub etc.) on the internet demonstrates that perfect enforcement of copyright would bottleneck creativity even further than the current status of copyright enforcement already does.
Re: Re: Re:5
If this was true, we wouldn’t have academics complaining about how their Phd’s are needed to obtain money to the university instead of doing actual research.
Re: Re: Re:6
This would be a valid point if that was the complaint being made, but it’s not.
Copyright could disappear tomorrow and universities would still make educational requirements of academics.
Re: Re:
Nobody owes you a free mansion, toiletpaper.
Perhaps you should try making something of value, at least once in your life.
Re: Re: Re:
The only thing of value he makes is what he leaves in the toilet every morning.
Re: Re: Re:
You would think that for someone who desperately wants enough people (read: students, not adults) using his software, Tero would be trying to pitch his content instead of starting every fucking conversation with useless apologist rhetoric for the RIAA (who doesn’t even operate in Finland).
Tero’s the sort of nutter who would, upon being asked directions to the nearest bathroom, spend an hour explaining to the person about to pee themselves why cartography is a respected but dying profession and people should be banned from using Google Maps to navigate.
Re: Re: Re:2
lol, remember the time when Tero insisted that the only way for subway stations and lines to recoup their costs of construction was selling subway maps
Re: Re: Re:3
I found the corresponding article.
I can’t be bothered to read all of the comments. I did land on a gold quote from Tero:
Here’s an excerpt from Scary Devil Monastery’s reply in the same thread but not to that particular comment:
Damn. I should run a government service which people depend on to make a living, then illegally introduce deliberate errors into the service information! And wouldn’t it be funny if a tourist trying to get to Times Square ended up at Bowling Green? Or even in another borough entirely? What a riot! I’m gonna make it happen. I’m not actually a New Yorker, so it’s carpetbagging time.
Re: Re: Re:4
It’s worth pointing out that this is no mere idle quip from Tero. When Tero was caught using a character model from Friday Nights at Freddy’s in his tech demo, it was pointed out that this invalidated his claim that Meshpage has automatic copyright infringement detection. The claim was already incredibly suspect to begin with, considering that Tero boasted that the copyright infringement detection system does not, and will not, rely on an external database to determine whether a 3D model infringes on copyright, but he went on to make a claim that he will intentionally cripple the software to prevent future infringement. In practice, if a user used the circle or ellipse function to make the iconic Mickey Mouse logo, that function would become blocked.
Tero is literally a fan of making technology shittier to use, as an offering to his RIAA gods.
Re: Re: Re:5
This brings us to the ongoing topic of misuse. When internet users misuse the products that we offer, they risk losing the feature that allows the misuse. There are many situations like this already happening in our software development:
1) public github repo was lost when users learned how to use it for harrassment
2) large script size was lost when users tried to encode illegal copyrighted material to bypass copyright protection using the scripts
3) free url access was lost when users tried to put copyrighted works to urls without checking for infringement
But the general principle stands. If you misuse it, you’re going to lose it.
There’s no question about it that if you use circles to draw mickey mouse illegally, you’re going to lose circle primitive. The lost area need to be determined narrowly.
Re: Re: Re:6
This would be a bold claim if Meshpage had any users to start with.
Like, none of your three points is relevant here for the same reason, but citation 1 is worth pointing out again for the alleged harassment claim. From what can be seen from your limited Github interactions, this supposed “harassment” has one of two explanations: you got angry because people refused to give you the overinflated respect you wanted, or you got angry because people critiqued your code.
Precisely. Which is why if you sue people irresponsibly and demand extortion money from innocent people in the name of copyright, you’re going to lose copyright law. Hell, the fact that you’ve committed copyright infringement on Friday Nights at Freddy’s should have already been reason enough for you to lose access to Meshpage.
Except that’s not what you’re doing here. You’re not defining anything narrowly at all. You’re saying that because circles can be used to make vaguely Mickey Mouse shapes, no one should be allowed to use circles.
Re: Re: Re:7
itch.io: You have a new follower.
I currently have 20 followers in itch.io, so my evil world domination plan is progressing as expected.
This is almost true. I expected more from the people than what I get. When the expectation is that “more eyeballs and bugs are shallow”, i.e. the community would help with the development activities. What they instead did with the github repo was “look for dead code” and “complain about indentation problems”, neither of which have any help in actual software development.
After this kind of experiences with the github repo, I gave techdirt a chance to fix the situation by allowing them to create mansions with the technology.
Re: Re: Re:7
I’m not saying that. It just wont happen with the technology that I built. They’re free to find suitable technology somewhere else in the market, from the criminals who wouldn’t care about established practices and following the laws.
Re: Re: Re:8
Followers, not users. But thanks for preemptively admitting that your plan is evil, just like your plans to sue grandmothers and harvest their organs in the name of copyright law, and your plans to turn humans into robots to give you free labor.
Looking for dead code is a part of the optimization process. Why do you need code that doesn’t contribute to how it works? Indentation can be a bit nitpicky, but surely having good code practices is a good thing.
Based on how your technology failed to hold you responsible for infringing the copyright on Friday Nights at Freddy’s, it’s clear that your technology doesn’t have the capability you boast. On the other hand you have said that subways should include errors in their maps to catch copyright infringers, which means legitimate customers who pay for the maps will get lost after following maps with incorrect information. So no, the criticism of you is entirely warranted – you’d rather fuck things up for people who give you money just to get at people who don’t. In fact, pirates often have the superior experience because the content they use is never bothered by anti-piracy tech.
Re: Re: Re:9
This is why they do not need our help with building the technology. We can focus on areas of the market that actually need our help.
Re: Re: Re:9
yes, itch.io claims I have 519 users who downloaded my product.
Re: Re: Re:9
That’s not correct way to do optimization. You’re trying to change the development practices and that goes wrong way. Basically it’s like shooting a fly with a cannon. The development practice change is wasting developer time too much when the problem can be fixed (at the end) with 3 day sprint.
Correct way for optimization is to measure the performance impact first, and once a problem is found from the measurement, you can start finding problems. Unless they’ve built a tool that measures beauty of the code used, there’s no point in complaining about dead code. Once their measurement shows real performance impact, fixing it is ok. Otherwise not.
Re: Re: Re:10
Considering how your technology works, your “help” is like pissing on a raging wildfire and expecting to be paid for it.
Law of averages suggests that at some point you might have convinced a few folks to download your bloatware. 519 users would still be spread over 10 years, and that doesn’t even determine how many of those users are actually using Meshpage now. What we do know is, aside from the Flash animation-equivalent memes you put up, nobody else has produced a game or film based on Meshpage. Never mind that up until this point, your boast that Meshpage doesn’t commit copyright infringement was entirely based on the claim you made that “Meshpage has no users, therefore Meshpage has no users who commit copyright infringement, unlike Blender”.
You have no problem with this “shooting a fly with a cannon” approach with copyright enforcement, so it shouldn’t be a problem for you when applied to code.
lol, you’re the guy who keeps insisting that the whole point of Meshpage is to “look good” and actual functionality doesn’t matter so long as you can filch money from suckered investors. What you are is angry that people criticize your professed genius.
Re: Re: Re:11
“look good” requirement is already difficult enough for one person. The problem is that humans have eyes that can catch every small problem with the look good -requirement, thus only perfection is good enough for that requirement.
Re: Re: Re:12
Your obsession with people critiquing your work and having an imaginary standard you think you need to fulfill is a “you” problem, not ours.
No system is perfect, but most people get by. Because most people don’t threaten to sue and rape grandmothers in the name of copyright, unlike you.
Re: Re: Re:7
Well it always depends on how you define misuse. In our world, the settlement practices are not misuse, but a feature of the copyright law that the founders of the courtry built to the world so that everyone who spends time creating copyrighted works and gets products done, will see some kind of reward for the activity. The people who didn’t spend the time shouldn’t be on the receiving end of those rewards.
Re: Re: Re:8
Up until judges realized what you were doing, and declared that without any evidence to back up your claims, there was no difference from common thuggery and extortion.
Prenda Law didn’t spend that time, and you had no problem with them raping millions of dollars from people.
Re: Re: Re:4
There could be real reason for tourist map to lead customers to certain place. For example if the companies in that area paid the mapmaker significant amount of money… all of google’s adverticement business is based on this practice…
For railway company, they would probably make it easy to find the tube station for similar reasons.
In realworld, the errors inserted to maps are small or subtle enough that they do not disturb the map’s intended usage, and still those errors can be used for copyright checking.
Re: Re: Re:5
The world doesn’t operate completely based on SEO practices, or giving enough shit to the highest bidder. You can pay the government billions of dollars and it will not suddenly make 2 + 2 = 5.
What you have insisted is that mapmakers should make big enough errors for your copyright enforcers to catch. Generally your copyright enforcers have never been great on accuracy to begin with, so for this plan to work at all, you wouldn’t be able to do subtle. But then your “real world” is not, in fact, a real world at all. It’s a copyright hellscape where you believe you should be worshipped and paid money each time someone else breathes oxygen.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
I expect my current activity suddenly turns to gold after I have finished my quality improvement work. When customers see poor quality, it’s immediate reject for the material. Thus I didn’t really expect customers to line up waiting for their plastic buckets until the quality is in acceptable levels. My current activities involves improving loading times, optimizing the size of the downloaded packages, improving frame rates, adding more complex rendering to the scene, improving the deploy process, and overall usage flows will get good improvement.
Re: Re: Re:2
I mean, with the exception of adding more complex rendering (anything more complex at this stage is going to make your software run slower, not faster), all of those listed things are technically good things in software development. But you get flagged because realistically nobody expects any of the above to get implemented, because you’d rather spend time here screaming at everyone else for not giving you free money.
Re: Re: Re:3
I already implemented all of them.
Re: Re: Re:4
Then they’re not “current activities” anymore. And yet, nobody uses Meshpage.
Re: Re: Re:5
This isn’t true, since the implemented features have not been released yet to the public.
Re: Re: Re:6
Then your boast is meaningless, since it cannot be verified.
Re: Re: Re:7
I just let marketing goons to check it.
Re: Re: Re:8
Marketing goons? What do you even pay your marketing goons? It’s been ten years and your marketing goons haven’t done crap to give Meshpage more market penetration.
The truth is you don’t have marketing goons, because you can’t afford to pay anyone. You imagine having a team of people to fix your code, to market your software, because you’re a power hungry fucktard who peaked during the Amiga game design days and you desperately want to cling to this idea that you’re a leader and visionary worshipped by people. Except that from your own experiences, you absolutely can’t stand working with other people, so you can’t even get a team.
The solution to this orphan works problem is submitting a copyright registration and see if the original author comes forward. If he doesn’t, then the work becomes yours and you could submit the work to public domain if you felt that strongly about preservation.
Re:
This is an incomplete solution and a bad default. If the real author dies before the new copyright holder dies, then the copyright term will be longer than the real author’s life plus 70 years. At minimum, I would require that the new copyright holder forfeit statutory damages for the entire term, be precluded from suing for copyright infringement which occurred before the application got accepted, and have a term of only 70 years from the year of registration. Actually, even that would be unacceptable to me because it violates the original (at least in the US) mechanism of copyright: the author gets temporary exclusive control over the work and thus an economic benefit to make up for the cost, and the temporary nature of the term indirectly benefits the public in the long run. Arbitrarily letting someone else take the copyright would spawn a new class of lawyering, trolling, and fraud, and would make orphan works a first come, first serve contest to… continue keeping a work from the public. Requiring forfeit of statory damages as I suggested would make trolling for money but wouldn’t solve abuse via suing to ruin someone’s (say, a critic’s) life, nor would the condition alone make the work enter the public domain sooner.
A more appropriate default would be making orphan works tied to publishing date as with works for hire: 95 years after the year of publication. (Works for hire, which include all corporate works, have copyright terms which expire 95 years from the year of publication or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever is shorter.)
Even better, overhaul copyright so that the copyright term must be renewed each year for an increasing renewal fee: make the renewal fee grow exponentially, at least double every year. Include a one-month grace period for renewing which retroactively nullifies lawsuits during that period if the term ends up not getting renewed after the grace period is over. Otherwise, no retroactive extensions if the term lapses, so renewing months or even years in advance should be allowed. If the author dies while the term is active, then the term continues until the end of the year, has its grace period nullified, and can’t be renewed whatsoever.
Or leave registration the cap the total copyright term at no longer than 15 years from the year of publishing. If the work doesn’t get published within 15 years of its creation then it can’t be copyrighted. (Rufus Pollock in 2009 estimated “around 15 years for optimal copyright term with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years”) No extensions whatsoever. If the author dies while the term is active then the term continues and expires as if the author were alive.
Re:
Your solution is that people (or corporations) should be allowed to seize copyrights for works they had nothing to do with?
I don’t think you’ve thought this through.
Re: Re:
No, I would want a team of preservationists to procure copyrights for orphan works, and then send the copyrights those books, movies, music into the public domain, or use them for collaborative efforts so that those things could be used again.
Re: Re: Re:
Your “team” would have to number into the hundreds of thousands of people working 24/7, given that new copyrighted works have been established by the tens-of-thousands to millions every day for many decades.
Who’s paying for this “team” again? This article is only about a small subset of very specific works. THIS is why your idea is stupid.
(Also, I work with preservationists. For the most part, they don’t do this type of work. At all.)
Re: Re: Re:2
Because by gaining a copyright on an unclaimed work, then releasing it into the public domain, or using a copyleft license to ensure others can work on it, a preservationist could rescue something from copyright hell.
Only problem- it would mean that individual would need to agree to sacrifice his own freedom for that information.
Re: Re: Re:3
Two things.
Re: Re: Re:
…presumably these preservationists would be people, yes?
So how is that different from what I said?
Why do they get the copyrights in the first place if they’re going to “send” them to the PD afterwards? How does a temporary assignment of copyright to people who had nothing to do with the original work, followed by a revocation of the copyright, make more sense than just revoking the copyright in the first damn place?
I don’t know what this even means and I don’t think you do either.
Time to require Disney Corp(se) to release all the works composed by Walt Disney while he was decomposing. They gotta be somewhere. Let’s turn Disney Corp(se)’s holdings upside down. And strip-search every executive. And check the bank accounts of course, to see if they have been making regular payments to Walt Disney (Deceased), and how.
Disney Corp(se) must owe Walt Disney (Deceased) trillions by now.
Besides that, I don’t think I’ll have the time when I’m deceased, to check my bank balances for moneys owed me by my publishers for stuff I may have had published. Those filthy thieving beggars will be too busy defrauding me, I don’t doubt.
CopyRight Extension laws
Didn’t CopyRight Extension act in 1998 (and the one before I think when USA finally got into properly “practicing” Berne Convention [which it avoided until then]) cover this? Pretty sure that under it even works which were already in the public domain got pulled back under copyrighted protection?
Re:
Say what you will about whether the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 represents whether artists really want a really long copyright term beyond death if they think about it. I will always associate that copyright term extension act with its nickname The Mickey Mouse Protection Act (protection from whom? us humans in a different dimension of being, of course!) and the “forever less one day” quote from then Congresswoman Mary Bono and widow of Sonny Bono:
‘When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms’
so why didn’t they say so at the lengthening of terms? why didn’t they say something against the big companies? after all, those companies are the ones that want extension after extension, simply to stay alive
Re:
Because they had to rely on those big companies to get their works published. These days they have alternatives.
Re:
This is a good point to consider because it highlights how little evidence the article uses to support its conclusion. However, “artists didn’t say anything” also doesn’t support the alternative conclusion that copyright restrictions should be extended – at most in that direction, “artists didn’t say anything” justifies preserving the status quo. However, the article’s conclusion is relatively more legitimate because any artist who took the previous copyright term length (life plus 50 years) seriously in their financial calculations should’ve been aware of the term extension in comparison to more recent artists. On the other hand, I’m curious about whether the parties who lobbied for the 1998 term extension went out of their way to ensure that artists would be aware of it. I doubt it because I don’t think media companies care enough about everyday people to run awareness/education campaigns, much less target such campaigns at artists.
This is not a convincing framing. I’m sure that the large media companies (The Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, sports leagues, etc.) who lobbied for the 1998 copyright extension would’ve stayed alive just fine. If they start dying anytime soon then it’s because copyright has been too much of a crutch and they haven’t been leveraging their popularity to adjust their business models to provide greater value to their audiences without relying as much on enforcing artificial scarcity. Selling physical media which people can actually own (recall vinyl’s nostalgia mini-resurgence and the continued success of hardcopy books), selling physical merchandise, partnering with other companies for promotions/advertising, making commercial deals with fan content creators, hiring fan content creators, and generally winning the goodwill of the audiences are some strategies which don’t need copyright to be as restrictive and long as it is.