James Wimberly thinks that copyright terms are too long:
The catchy "bare necessities" song that Disney gave Baloo is solidly copyrighted. But we can quote it under the fair use doctrine, and it nicely makes the essential point: the 21-year limit of Queen Anne's Act (footnote) provided adequate incentives for authors; the 95 years or life-plus-75 years of contemporary IP law is a giveaway to a clever lobby of wealthy engrossers of the commons. If you don't believe me, check out Justice Breyer's dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft and the amici brief in the case of 17 eminent economists. The SCOTUS majority didn't pretend that the Mickey Mouse extension law was defensible policy, it just held that Congress was constitutionally entitled to its mistake.BTW, this particular piece of bad policy was imported from Europe. The European model for IP extravagance was the French Revolutionary legislation making "moral rights" in a work eternal and heritable : the scriveners had become the new nobility. So Shakespeare's heirs could sue Tom Stoppard, or Kipling's Disney, for traducing the sacred essence of the author's work. In practice this doesn't happen rarely happens even in France, but the principle created a sentimental fog over IP in progressive minds which has played into the hands of the lobby.
Footnote
Technically Queen Anne gave a skimpy 14 years for new works and 21 only to old ones. I'll generously let Disney keep 21 - a year more than Intel gets for its patents. When I last looked Intel was doing all right.
I think this is too strong. My understanding is that the French took a stronger line on IP precisely because the abolishment of copyright around the time of the French Revolution had bankrupted much of the publishing industry and resulted in a race to the bottom that destroyed the market for new works; commission a book, and if it failed you'd take the loss, whereas if it succeeded, your rivals would copy it within weeks.
I also think it's a mistake to bring up Queen Anne's Law for a couple of reasons. Few writers managed to actually make a living at their writing during that time; they had patrons, government jobs, or some other form of income. That suppressed and/or altered their output, not for the better.
Also, at a time when the average life expectancy is 40, a copyright term of 21 years provides more than adquate incentive. In the modern day, we're trying to persuade young writers and artists to essentially make a large capital investment in their art by irrevocably committing to a career in their art. If at 45 or 50 their most successful works no longer produce revenue, the writer who produced his or her best work at 25 has a big problem. Hedging their bets by keeping a second career going does not make them or us better off.
It seems to me that the strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors--people who already have their retirement taken care of.
Nor do patents or software make a good comparison. Intel is hardly going to keep producing the same design for 20 years--it will be obsolete long before the patent expires. Moreover, society reaps much greater rewards from technology copying than from the reproduction of art. We are better off with more Mark Twain works than with 50 lesser writers quoting him liberally.
It is obvious to me that current copyright terms are too long. 21 years may not be enough to get writers to invest their all in their craft, but 95 years seems excessive; I don't think we will get more work out of 35 year old authors by promising to someday pay royalties to their as-yet-unborn grandchildren. And clearly, retroactivity is a gift to corporate interests that is actively contrary to the public good. But there is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes.
There should be a scale. There should also be only one entity that holds the rights (this entity may be composed of several people, but you should never have to go to more than one person to get an agreement to license the rights).
First 20 years after the work is created, automatic copyright, no fee.
21-30 years after: $1000 registration fee for the decade, if no fee is paid by the rights holder, it goes to public domain.
31-40 : $10,000 fee
41-50 : $100,000
51-60 : $1m
61-70 : $10m
And $100m fee per decade after the 70 year mark.
These are rather arbitrary numbers, and they should be adjusted for inflation, but they would allow Disney to keep Micky Mouse out of the public domain (for a fee) forever, while giving lesser known works a public domain revival as the rights holders make the economic decision to let the registrations lapse.
Furthermore, giving authors and publishers incentives to produce isn't the only positive thing about copyright. Having a work owned by someone avoids a "tragedy of the commons" situation, though at the cost, here, of creating a monopoly.
Once you get outside twenty years or so, copyright makes no sense as an economic incentive. The NPV today (which is when the incentive allegedly applies) of the expected revenue in those later years is probably pretty close to zero.
Another idea:
Create two terms: one for individuals and LLC's with less than, say, six owners, and another for larger entities. The latter presumably have the means to commission, create, and distribute new material ad infinitum; the former are limited by time and have every right to live off the fruits of their labor (and good fortune) as they see fit.
Meanwhile...
Another issue that barely gets raised at all is what happens when works fall into the black hole of uncertain ownership. Once that happens, re-use never occurs because nobody knows from whom they need to obtain rights clearance. In effect, such matter becomes untouchable and ultimately forgotten, in no small part because the existing terms are too long!
"It seems to me that the strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors--people who already have their retirement taken care of."
I'm sorry but this is egregiously mistaken.
Academics, whether they are tenured or not, unless they are big stars, do not make any money on publishing books. The income they receive from book sales doesn't even pay for the coffee they drank while writing the thing.
It would be nice if you had even a tenuous grasp of reality.
"The NPV today (which is when the incentive allegedly applies) of the expected revenue in those later years is probably pretty close to zero."
Setting a registration fee above zero would make the rights holders decide whether or not they can still make an income off of the works. This provides an incentive to release the work to the public domain if the work is not producing a revenue stream above the filing fee, but still gives the rights holder the option to release it or not.
Alan:
Having a work owned by someone avoids a "tragedy of the commons" situation, though at the cost, here, of creating a monopoly.
Tragedy of the commons only occurs when consumption is rivalrous.
Rickm, it looks like you are making Megan's point. Their retirement is taken care of by tenure.
Professors don't generally get much in book revenue, therefore they don't care much about copyright.
Ben and Nelson make very good points. I have no problem with unlimited copyright lasting forever. Disney is certainly using the IP and we all know where to go to get it or license it.
My problem is with orphan or abandoned works. With tangible property, ownership is almost always clear. With IP, it is usually unclear. I would have no problem with copyright being as it is today for say 20 years then requiring registration with some body, perhaps governmental, perhaps private for successive terms. Nelson's $1000 sounds a bit high (I'd say more like $100)but not too unreasonable.
The key is that there has to be a way to find ownership of the millions of works that cannot be used or republished because nobody knows who owns them.
John Henry
It would be nice if you had even a tenuous grasp of reality.
It would be nice if you read what she wrote. Tenured academics have a guaranteed income stream from the university until they retire, and from their retirement plan thereafter. Authors don't.
SF and technology writer Jerry Pournelle has been blogging about authors and copyright issues for quite a while. He was satisfied with 28 with a 28 renewal. He thinks the current regime (which Victor Hugo had a hand in creating) is way too long, helping only corporate and big name author interests. However, he is very concerned with the rise of file sharing sites that make free copies of his works available. (He also quotes Heinlein as saying "authors are gamblers", with no certain income in the future.) He wants a way for authors to make a middle-class income if they produce marketable books and without some kind of enforceable copyright regime, the can't.
Sebastian,
Megan said that the "strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors."
You said that professors "don't care much about copyright."
These are two different arguments.
And the professors retirement is NOT taken care of by tenure. I can't believe I have to explain this but, if a professor is retired...they aren't working. So they aren't drawing a salary unless they work part time or receive a pension plan. Tenured simply ensures that a professor can't be fired without due process--which often means that a professor has the option to work until they decide they don't want to work anymore (which is called retiring). Sigh.
Also, at a time when the average life expectancy is 40, a copyright term of 21 years provides more than adquate incentive.
It's disappointing to see Megan make this argument. She should know that average life expectancy is tremendously affected by infant mortality. At the time of Queen Anne's Law and for a long time before, someone who survived to age five was very likely to live to age 70. Whoever wrote Psalm 90 thousands of years ago lived in a society whose average life expectancy was 40 years or less; but even he claimed that adults lived to be "threescore years and ten."
I don't know why the original copyrights were slated to expire in 21 years. But I doubt it was because the authors of the bill expected to be dead at age 40.
Rickm, I can't believe that I have to explain this, but tenured professors are people who, barring egregious misconduct, will be employed until they are handed a pension. They are also basically patronized by the University, meaning they don't need to make money off their published work. Unlike, say, journalists or novelists. Short copyright costs them almost nothing. I notice none of them favor shortening tenure terms.
Even $1 registration fee per year would be better than what we have now. The fact that someone known (by the process of filing itself) with authority to license the rights would have the rights and not 30 people who may be unknown would solve a lot of problems with orphaned works. I chose to make the registration terms in decades in my original example for convenience sake. I picked a rising scale in the belief that older works should lean more toward the public domain, but that is just personal opinion and isn't necessary.
rickm, without going into how many professors have taxpayer-funded pensions, or are provided pensions from private schools with huge endowments, a person who can only be terminated due to gross misbehavior, and whose salary is well above median, really does have a guaranteed retirement, with any sort of planning. Does your desire to engage in witless snark prevent any sort of thinking? Sigh.
But that's not what you initially said--you said that tenured professors were "strict advocates" of short copyright terms--as if tenured professors actively agitate for shorter copyright terms. And you implied that the reason they were "strict advocates" of shorter copyright terms was because their retirement is taken care of.
The point is that most of them don't care, because it doesn't matter to them. And the reason it doesn't matter to them is that they don't make money off of selling books. Furthermore, academic journals have no problem if an author reprints something that a journal already published--they just need to be notified. Essentially, no one enforces rights over printed material, which further reinforces my point that the vast majority of tenured professors don't care about copyright, which is incompatible with saying that they are "strict advocates" of shorter copyright terms.
Breyer's thinking that the language of the Constitution does not grant Congress limitless power to set copyright lengths is no doubt correct, but then again Breyer is the sort of sophist who thinks the term "public use" grants legislative bodies limitless power in exercising eminent domain.
It'd be nice to someday have five, or, hell, three justices on the Supreme Court who would at least endeavor to have some internal consistency.
Nor do patents or software make a good comparison. Intel is hardly going to keep producing the same design for 20 years--it will be obsolete long before the patent expires. Moreover, society reaps much greater rewards from technology copying than from the reproduction of art. We are better off with more Mark Twain works than with 50 lesser writers quoting him liberally.
Perhaps haste makes waste, and since these points were given in passing, you didn't fully explain your intended meaning. As written, however, neither of these suggests, to me, that you have a very deep understanding of either aspect.
Regarding the former, some fundamental (and patentable) inventions can live forever, and are found somewhere deep within any given piece of technology. The transistor is an obvious example, but in the case of Intel, many of the fundamental structures of modern computer processors and memory products that Intel developed or improved, can be found in modern computing products. If Intel could have patented these for anything resembling modern copyright terms, the progress of technology would have been substantially hindered.
Okay, you favor limited terms on technology protections because there is more "societal benfit". Is there? Have you forgotten how Disney got rich in the first place? Largely, it was because they found clever ways to retell and resell public domain stories.
IMO your distinction is lacking a difference.
RickM, would you at least pretend to read what was written? This statement.....
"It seems to me that the strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors--people who already have their retirement taken care of."
....which makes exactly zero claims about what, in your words, "most" tenured professors care about. Sheesh.
Rickm, all bullmastiffs are dogs, but not all dogs are bullmastiffs . . .
Megan, there is an effect you are neglecting: as copyright periods increase, this effects incentives in two directions:
1) the obvious, expected profits increase, increasing incentve to work.
2) Writers can expect to profit longer off of their previous work, allowing them to "live off there previous work"
Because of the decreasing marginal utility from money, effect 2 overpowers effect 1 pretty quickly. There have been some nice papers on this( google "optimal copyright period"), and the current estimate is that a period of around 14 years maximizes incentives to produce.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that
"Few writers managed to actually make a living at their writing during that time; they had patrons, government jobs, or some other form of income. That suppressed and/or altered their output, not for the better."
In a column in the Guardian about books/publishing a few days ago Simon Jenkins stated:
"Of some 200,000 titles on the market, just 5% will sell more than 3,500 copies."
Apparently few writers today manage to actually make a living solely from writing. My guess is that the vast majority of contemporary published authors have "patrons, government jobs, or some other form of income".
Methinks your thinking along those lines to justify a longer copyright term have no reasonable historic rationalization.
Megan further states:
"Nor do patents or software make a good comparison. Intel is hardly going to keep producing the same design for 20 years--it will be obsolete long before the patent expires."
Well...again I think you could not be more wrong.
Technology in the marketplace really only advances because of the fact that you can only make money off your invention for a fairly limited time. That provides one hell of an incentive for R&D into the "next big thing".
Intel would very likely still be only making 286 processors if they knew that their patents could not be challenged for 80 years. Big Pharma would love to be able to have patent terms extended to the terms afforded to copyrights (who benefits from cheap generics anyway?).
You don't see Congress continuing to muck around with the terms of patents as they do with copyrights for the very simple reason that we all realize that short patent lengths are necessary for the advancement and betterment of our lives. Whether Mickey Mouse is not in the public domain for 50 years or another 200 years is not likely to have any great impact on the quality of most of our lives.
Ger wrote: Whether Mickey Mouse is not in the public domain for 50 years or another 200 years is not likely to have any great impact on the quality of most of our lives.
I reiterate for your benefit, also: Go back and look at how Disney became a household brand in the first place. A very large portion of the entertainment they have provided to millions, as well as the employment of those producing it, came from the retelling of tales from the public domain.
The keeping of Disney's earliest creations in corporate iron manacles prevents a new generation of talent from repeating this process upon the expanded body of artistic work, and as such, very much DOES have an impact on society.
I don't think we will get more work out of 35 year old authors by promising to someday pay royalties to their as-yet-unborn grandchildren. - MM
No, that won't work. But any and all other ideas for getting more work out of 30-something authors would be eagerly welcomed by this 30-something author, up to and including the cat-o'nine.
we're trying to persuade young writers and artists to essentially make a large capital investment in their art by irrevocably committing to a career in their art. If at 45 or 50 their most successful works no longer produce revenue, the writer who produced his or her best work at 25 has a big problem.
I'd say his problem is that he's a lousy writer with only one decent book in him. Why should he be entitled to write one good book and then coast for the rest of his life? And what sort of capital investment is required to be an author? Isn't creative writing the least capital intensive occupation there is?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this claim, Megan. Would you be willing to flesh it out a bit? I can see how allowing people to simply print and sell Mark Twain's works without his permission would tend to reduce the number of quality original works, but how does letting people "quote him liberally" have the same effect? Once you start talking about derivative works, it's not as obvious to me that the value of the expression you're suppressing through copyright law doesn't outweigh the marginal added incentive you're giving original authors. After all, what gives a great work its cultural value is not simply that we all read it passively, but that we internalize it, quote from it, reference it, reinterpret and recast it in different versions, etc. I'm also not sure I understand what you're thinking of when you refer to the rewards from technology copying.
With regard to Alan and Brandon's brief exchange above, it seems to me that there's one sense in which one might argue there's a tragedy of the commons in expression even though the works at issue are not, strictly speaking, rivalrous. The argument would go something like this: If there were no copyright, everyone and his brother could go out there and flood the market with Harry Potter sequels, movies, merchandise, to the point where we'd all get so sick of the character that any future value to be derived from him is sucked dry. If that had happened, say, after Rowling's second book, then it might well have prevented her from having a market for all the other ones, and we'd have been deprived of the rest of the "real" series in exchange for a bunch of shoddy knock offs. So the overall societal value (assuming such a term has meaning) of her work would be diminished from what it would have been had she been given a right to exclude. Perhaps what we're really saying here is that while intellectual works are not rival goods, the human attention span is indeed consumed rivalrously. I don't know that I ultimately buy this argument, mind you, but it makes some sense I think.
A historical counter-argument is Cervantes. Don Quixote came out in two installments. After the first book, there were lots of knock off sequels that Cervantes had no power to shut down. Today we remember them only because Cervantes has his characters make fun of them in his own Book 2, which in fact there's reason to think he would not have gotten around to writing before his death if not for the spur provided by the competition.
Intel is hardly going to keep producing the same design for 20 years--it will be obsolete long before the patent expires
And yet they still manage to profitably design microchips. Is it really that much harder to write books?
Why do todays authors need a longer copyright period than Dickens, Trollope, Twain etc?
Megan,
If, when you wrote that "the strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors" you actually meant "tenured professors who make a significant amount of money from their published works, but not too much money that may dwarf their income from their salary or pension plan (like, say, Alan Dershowitz)" then I apologize for interpreting your words literally and narrowly. Perhaps offering some indication that you meant a subset of the group of 'tenured professor' that comprised, say, less than 1% of the whole group may have led me to the correct and charitable interpretation.
Given that the copyright extension fight was led by Disney, it's a big mistake to think of this as a way of encouraging authors to produce more work. Nobody who writes for Disney owns the copyright to anything they write. (I know; I've written for Disney.) The longevity of the term of the copyright is a factor that interests the corporation which owns the copyright, not the guy who writes the material. In principle the fact that Disney will own properties for longer might mean it considers the properties worth more, which means it will pay more to writers in order to obtain the copyrights of their works for hire (or to buy screenplays off of said writers). But in practice I cannot imagine that the expected gains from a 95- as opposed to a 70-year or 50-year term, discounted down to a current price for the property (accounting for risk and depreciation), amount to a hill of beans. I certainly didn't notice the price of my work-for-hire screenplays going up significantly when the copyright extension went through in the mid-90s.
The overwhelming benefit of copyright extensions go to massive corporations that already own aging properties that are about to expire. As such they're basically a giveaway by the public to powerful corporations. Put it this way: a DVD of "Snow White" for your kids ought to cost about $3 right about now. If you paid $12 for it, that was the US Government taking money from your pocket and giving it to Disney, for no good reason.
I'd say his problem is that he's a lousy writer with only one decent book in him. Why should he be entitled to write one good book and then coast for the rest of his life?
I'd say as long as he is alive and the IP he created is still convincing people to pay money to enjoy it, this is enough reason to entitle him to coast.
Nor do patents or software make a good comparison. Intel is hardly going to keep producing the same design for 20 years--it will be obsolete long before the patent expires.That may be the case in IT, but that is not the case in, for instance, pharmaceuticals. Drugs generally do not become obsolete before the patent expires. In fact typically the patent expires while the drug is still very much in favour, and then a host of competitors copy the existing drug and sell it cheaply (because they haven't had to pay for the research, testing, etc). If Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, etc have to cope with 20 years, I'm sure Disney can scrape by with 21.
"It seems to me that the strictest advocates of very short copyright terms tend to be tenured professors--people who already have their retirement taken care of."
It seems to me that the discussion of this tidbit has missed the more salient point: this is the most pure textbook example of an ad hominem argument as you are likely to see in the wild.
"A historical counter-argument is Cervantes. Don Quixote came out in two installments. After the first book, there were lots of knock off sequels that Cervantes had no power to shut down. Today we remember them only because Cervantes has his characters make fun of them in his own Book 2, which in fact there's reason to think he would not have gotten around to writing before his death if not for the spur provided by the competition."
Then there is Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." It isn't as widely known as Don Quixote, but it is one of the great works of 16th century Italian literature (and very funny). It was a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato," which is utter pablum and remembered today only for inspiring Ariosto's work.
The modern assumption is that derived work is hack work. This has not always been the case. People sometimes snigger at Shakespeare for stealing material, but that was accepted practice and not at all a sign of being a hack.
I'm not sure where I am going with this, apart from pointing out that derived works are not necessarily meritless.
Why do todays authors need a longer copyright period than Dickens, Trollope, Twain etc?
I think that's exactly right. I'm just not seeing any evidence for Megan's assumption that longer copyright terms equal greater works. Be interested to see a reply to David Shor's point:
Megan, there is an effect you are neglecting: as copyright periods increase, this effects incentives in two directions:
1) the obvious, expected profits increase, increasing incentve to work.
2) Writers can expect to profit longer off of their previous work, allowing them to "live off there previous work"
Because of the decreasing marginal utility from money, effect 2 overpowers effect 1 pretty quickly. There have been some nice papers on this( google "optimal copyright period"), and the current estimate is that a period of around 14 years maximizes incentives to produce.
In fact, one could argue that if Dickens had been able to enforce his copyright in America, he would have made enough more money that he would have written fewer books.
Sometimes it is the need for more income that inspires more work, even among talented authors. The notion that authors are motivated only by some artistic muse probably is more true of bad writers than of the best.
I like 50 years. It's a half-century, a nice round number. It's pretty much the rest of the author's life.
It would mean that stuff produced in 1958 and earlier would be freely available, and that seems like a pretty reasonable balance to me.
I'd settle for no more increases. 95 years, probably it too long, but if its going to be 95, fine make it 95, but no extensions after that, otherwise we don't have a 95 year limit we have perpetual copyright.
It seems many miss several critical points:
(1) By nature, authors/musicians are generally uninterested in becoming wealthy - after working with artists for many years, I am certain that anyone entering this field for the paycheck will soon find other employment. As such, an author/musician lucky enough to find financial fortune in his works will not sit on his laurels collecting royalty checks, as his motivation to create will be the same as it was when he was poor. Any arguments that depend on an economically-motivated author necessarily fail.
(2) Megan's comparison with patents is not as off target as some might think. Patents and copyrights exist as incentives to create, though the motivations for each is fundamentally different. Both creations benefit society. However, with copyright, it is the very act of creation itself that is valuable to us all - once a piece of art has been created, the world has benefited. Copyright law exists to encourage creation of art; it does not exist to protect the economic interests of the author.
Megan rightly points out that there is little social utility in allowing an individual to copy the creative work of another - the art adds richness to our culture, whether there is one or a thousand of a particular work is of little consequence to us as a public. Sure, we might all like to see a particular painting, or listen to a particular song, but our ability to do so is not so critical as the existence of the art in the first place.
On the other hand, patents have value in their use and exploitation. (Yes, copyrights earn income in their use but again, their real value is intangible.) Patents save lives; patents save the environment; patents progress society. We grant patents to provide an ECONOMIC incentive to inventors to continue inventing, but the SOCIAL value comes from the use of those inventions by the public. Copyrights are designed to provide an incentive to continue creating for the sake of art - the social value is in the incentive itself.
This is why copyrights are afforded longer terms than patents, and why the difference is justifiable. A purely economic incentive should be relatively short in duration, whereas a cultural incentive should be longer. In patents, the social utility comes after the incentive period, whereas in copyrights, the social utility comes during the incentive period.
I am also not sure the Intel example is apt. It is true that much of todays technology is fairly new, but there is much re-use (aMouseforallSeasons said it better earlier)
Also, though, if we are just going to base it off of future results, then why would we not compare it to writings as well and compare of much this post for example is going to be cited or re-used even one year from now much less 20. If we said that only ".1% of all writings will be of any use in 20 years", would that argue against copyright in your mind? I doubt it would.
Even though I think copyright should be more like patents than vice-versa, it think it would be interesting to see what would have happened if patents had been more like copyrights. Instead of using common elements(most of which had patents expire long ago), engineers would have incentive to come up with solutions that are just different enough to get past patents. In some ways, this system might even create better solutions in the long run as there is the constant search for unpatented solutions instead of currently making do with "good enough".
The mean lifespan of the American founding fathers was 67 years according to wikipedia. This was probably typical for middle class males at that time.
Our early copyright laws assumed that the author would outlive the copyright. Which is as it should be. The idea of copyright is utilitarian - to encourage creative effort in society as a whole. Both extremely short and extremely long copyrights discourage creativity. The answer is in the middle. So I agree with Megan, but would shove the optimum toward the lower end than she would. I think.
Hedging their bets by keeping a second career going does not make them or us better off.
Isn't that an empirical question?
At any rate the point is very, very much not about reproduction. The point is about all the other sorts of uses that copyright prohibits, such as adaptation and even inspiration. You're perfectly free to do a Shakespeare adaptation film like Richard III or Scotland, PA, but what if you wanted to do a version of The Great Gatsby, or The Grapes of Wrath? Sorry, can't, never mind they're decades old and embedded in American culture, they're still "owned" by somebody.
The fact is that art evolves through imitation and adaptation. It's simply unfathomable that the incentive effect of an extra lifetime of copyright protection, much less a few extra years above where we are with patents, gives us enough additional art at the margin to make up for what we lose from being unable to fully utilize and grow upon existing art that's become part of the collective unconscious.
engineers would have incentive to come up with solutions that are just different enough to get past patents.
That's called "design around" and it's one of the many services your friendly patent attorney can help you with.
Co Sense says: "Copyright law exists to encourage creation of art; it does not exist to protect the economic interests of the author."
Perhaps your statement was accurate 200 years ago.
However, given the way Congress has followed the orders of their corporate masters I think the current reality is just the opposite.
In a few decades when Mickey is once again about to be "liberated" Disney will spend the money necessary to ensure that the term is extended again.
Jack Valenti, the late head of the MPAA was famously quoted some years ago that the "limited terms" for copyright as mentioned in the Constitution should be "infinity minus one day". We can expect the corporate interests to keep trying to achieve that.
The best discussion of copyright I have seen is in Eric Flint's columns. In particular, see
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos2
and
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3
He is a professional author who is arguing for the reduction of copyright. He points out that copyright is a government granted monopoly that exists because it seems to be the best way to encourage writers to write. It still has all the economic drawbacks of any other type of monopoly.
from the first article
...
All right, let me recapitulate. So far, I've addressed the first two of the three questions I posed at the beginning of this essay:
1) What sort of protection do authors require, to make sure that they can and will keep engaging in their labor?
2) Why do they need a particular sort of protection, as opposed to another?
That leaves the third question, which is the critical one for the rest of what I'll be discussing in this essay:
3) For how long do they need it?
I'll discuss the details involved in this question in my next essay. But for now, briefly, there are two answers to this question:
First, authors need to have enough protection to enable them to be able to make a living as full-time writers.
Second, that protection has to be long enough to provide them with a motivation to write for the public, and see doing so as a possible profession.
But that's it. Those are the only two legitimate concerns. Any term of copyright which exceeds that minimum necessary length, as Macaulay put it in the quote I cited in my last column, has no legitimate purpose. Once you cross that line, a necessary evil has simply become an evil—and the farther past that line you go, the more evil it gets.
...
Disney and its corporate rivals are simnply trying to turn a law intended to encourage writers into a law that gaurantees their income forever.
Donald Clarke
Am I the only published novelist posting here?
A lot of the folks opposed to long terms of copyright appear to assume that if one sells a book, one has hit the jackpot, so one shouldn't object to one's work going public domain 20 or 30 years after it first appeared.
My first novel (Bander Snatch) reached bookstores in June, 1979. The advance against royalties was a princely $5,000, for a book that took well over a year to write. It didn't "earn out" -- that is, sell enough copies so that royalties (6% of cover price) exceeded the advance. Never got another check for it.
A publisher is interested in leasing reprint rights for $1,000 or so. That'll bring my gross earnings on the book up to six grand. Isn't that just excellent pay for a year's work?
Y'all are focused on Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. What you don't understand is that they're the exceptions. They're all the way to the right on the Bell Curve.
Here's the reality: For first printings, the vast majority of novelists are making between $2,500 and $10,000 per book.
We writers need long-term copyrights so that we can maybe, someday, through the magic of reprints, earn enough money to pay the rent.
[needing patrons or a second job] suppressed and/or altered their output, not for the better.
Is there evidence that having to please a patron doesn't tend to improve the quality of the work? It's certainly not intuitive. I'm sure we can all think of examples of artists whose good early work needed to please gatekeepers and for whom the removal of the constraint produced a lower-quality result. Later work was needlessly large, complex, self-indulgent, or unfocused.
I'm sure we can all think of examples of artists whose good early work needed to please gatekeepers and for whom the removal of the constraint produced a lower-quality result. Later work was needlessly large, complex, self-indulgent, or unfocused.
How about the perenniel hipster favorite, The Family Guy?
The first three seasons, risque thought they were, were conceived for network television and had to get past a censor. As a result, even though it pushed the boundaries of good taste wherever possible, a lot of the humor was carefully crafted around extremely clever juxtaposition and absurd parody of hisotrical figures and cultural icons.
When the show came back on cable, it quickly devolved into a shock-jock potty festival.
The copyright term is too long, especially compared to patents which are 14-20 years at significant expense: $3500 to file and additional fees after the patent award, which can take two-plus years. And that's after you had your great idea, sketched it and described it in sufficient detail, probably built a prototype and had it searched, drafted, submitted and shepherded by an attorney.
Copyright on a scribble is an automatic 70-120 years without registration, or about $40 to register as many images/songs/words as you can fit on a CD, plus some time slogging through the form.
A century is a long time to lock up the expression of an idea. The bar is high for patents and ridiculously low for copyrights. These two types of ownership should be more equitable. Trademark is another problematic issue, as they can last forever and become increasingly harder to get. (So unless Pepsi forgets to renew, using "uh huh" on a poster could draw a desist letter. And T-mobile will challenge any communications company that uses their trademarked color magenta, never mind that it fills one chamber of every inkjet cartridge on Earth.)
I would say most of intellectual property law is not about encouraging innovation, but about holding property and making a profit. Real or virtual, it's all just property to be branded and fenced off. The IP barons are marking huge swaths of the virtual wilderness. The little guys also want to grab a piece to live on and pass down to the kids.
It's natural to want to maintain ownership forever, but long copyright terms have the effect of restricting the expression of ideas the same way you can't find a single unclaimed piece of the Wild West after a century of Manifest Destiny. Yes, land is finite and ideas are infinite, but the expression of an idea is not unique. If you've been to Yosemite you probably took photos of Bridal Falls from the Meadows, and they might look a lot like mine. The very expression of an idea is to give it to others. How much ownership can Disney really claim once Mickey became such a common aspect of the culture that his name is generic for something that was put together all goofy?
There are good points here in favor of a lengthy copyright, but a government institution can't allow an owner's stake in a product to choke off expression. What they'll get is what we've got: lots of lawsuits, lots of creativity growing through the cracks and breaking sidewalks.
And another thing... (oh, is that taken?)
For creative professionals or their employers, the trend is definitely to put a copyright notice on our work and register some or all. The law doesn't require this but it's a big issue right now with the Orphan Works legislation, two versions of which are floating through Congress today. The question is whether something unmarked is unclaimed, and how to let people know if it's public domain and free to use.
A copyright or Creative Commons notice and keywords can be added digitally to Word docs or Acrobat pdfs (via Properties), Photoshop images (File Info) and etc, or added to the bottom of published images and articles. Not large but visible, so even if someone crops/edits, you'll know they knew.
Copyright law also doesn't require formal registration, but you'll be glad you did it *before the fact* if you ever find your work infringed and have to take it to court.
The potential size of databases being developed to search copyrights is mindboggling. Try the USPTO images section for a relatively short trip into information overload. This is another reason why long copyright terms are a bad idea. Google and iStockphoto might be the nearest things we've got to what such a database would be like, but they've only been around 10 years or so.
I've run down a few ownerships and it's time-consuming without any structure. But so will wading through gajillions of expressions of all types in all medias - texts, photos, patterns... with millions added daily and each one locked down for a 100 years, give or take.
Some kind of tracking is necessary to determine what's in the public domain, and what's still covered by whose copyright. That's why copyright owners need to mark their work and consider registration - whether it's a lone creative or Disney etc.
engineers would have incentive to come up with solutions that are just different enough to get past patents.
For a classic example of this, look to the right of your monitor. The telephone.
Alexander Bell had invented the electromasgnetic mouthpiece and earpiece. In trying to get around this patent, Edison came up with the carbon granule mouthpiece which allowed much higher powered systems, allowing commercial success.
spxi nbiec xbiy qausrpcxj ljnx zhemjxqb oqtx
spxi nbiec xbiy qausrpcxj ljnx zhemjxqb oqtx