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All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

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Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#211

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

grishka wrote: post #115
t-writescode wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2-3 years is no time at all. Someone could hand a movie studio a script in hopes of it being made a movie, the movie studio could wait 4 years, and then make the movie, with no harm to them whatsoever.

Huh. A movie studio. Yes, my proposal also has a nice side effect of filtering out those who are in it for the money, not self-expression. The world would become a better place if there were no "entertainment industry".

What if anything do you watch for entertainment?

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#212

Post by account42 »

kube-system wrote: post #189
kragen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't have been a problem for Charles M. Schultz. One month of copyright would have been enough to keep him well fed. Same for Nassim Taleb. In the age of the web, the big company's shitty bundled product may have a hard time competing with the creator's website. How many laptop vendors ship a custom fork of Ubuntu? But of course Ubuntu's kernel isn't exactly Linus's mainline, but I don't see him complaining.

Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success. Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain. In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where cop…

> Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.

It affects everyone. Most only negatively.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#213

Post by account42 »

t-writescode wrote: post #177
grishka wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is copyright, but it's non-transferable and only lasts for 2-3 years. After that time, yes, anyone can copy and distribute it. My idea here is that you would have the option of either paying right now, or waiting when the copyright expires and getting it legally for free. In our current system people don't even consider that copyrights have an expiry date, they operate as if they're effectively indefinite. And…

I think the big problem here is that 2-3 years is almost no time at all . With 2-3 years, basically everyone will wait for the next book in the Game of Thrones series to come out of costing money. Covid has been nearly 2 years, and for many of us it feels both like yesterday and also like forever ago, for example. And then you'll have people that want to watch the movie of something, so they're willing to pay the vid…

Most video games already quickly become cheaper much less than 2-3 years after release. Some are even given away at some point. Yet most sales still happen close to release. The expectation that the average consumer has the patience to wait for 2-3 years if they can get something now for a reasonable price is odd.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#214

Post by account42 »

tomcam wrote: post #205
grishka wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. A movie studio. Yes, my proposal also has a nice side effect of filtering out those who are in it for the money, not self-expression. The world would become a better place if there were no "entertainment industry".

Is there something wrong with creating solely for money and not self-expression?

Not inherently. What is wrong is asking society to bend over backwards to enable that.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#215

Post by account42 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #206
vineyardmike wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ensure the copy you buy isn't adulterated and modified? One benefit of copyright is that the author can ensure the "real" one is shared... which you may care about when viewing content. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/technology/amazon-orwell-...

Trivially solved with hashing or signing. Copyright as a legal mechanism is unnecessary to ensure 'legitimacy'. Copyright is useful for preventing others from using characters you created, but frankly I don't see the value in that. Moreover, it isn't even effective as fan fiction is incredibly common anyway. We can see how this would work with the proliferation of open source and the commonness of forks. It really is…

Copyrights are not only unnecessary for ensuring that the work you receive matches the original as copyright holders are free to make modifications. Worse, with the current copyright system the copyright holders can prevent the original from being distributed at all.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#216

Post by account42 »

ben_w wrote: post #66
mattl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?

Not OP, but I think it makes very little difference whatever number you pick between “none” and “forever”. Earlier this year a few authors whose work I enjoy tweeted furiously about this topic. Similar arguments may apply to audio and visual copyright. If, for example, copyright lasted 14 years, then The Atrocity Archives (Stross) would already be public domain, which reduces incentive to create more in the series (n…

> Making copyright last 100(average of all x) fails to harm society by preventing the work from becoming public domain

That does not follow. Even if literally everyone who was interested in the work already has a copy, copyright prevents others from building on top of it. That is the harm.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#217

Post by andrekandre »

cgio wrote: post #203
andrekandre wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That includes other creative occupations and most of the employees of e.g. movie studios. Are we fairly compensating _them_ for their work? what i find really interesting is, why is it that a company owns what i make there automatically? afaik i didn't sign any copyright assignment in my work contract... i wonder what the legal basis is for that?

You most probably did. At least I know I did. And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends. You will have trouble using your creative outputs when moving betwee…

  > And the point is exactly that, instead of protecting creative output copyright is locking it down by capitalising it. Rather than creativity being a flow of meaningful communication and exchange at the level of ideas and aesthetics, it’s becoming a stock with ongoing financial and not creative dividends.
on that note, there are some proposals (superdistribution - brad cox, xanadu - ted nelson, etc) that would allow any works to be licensed from/to anyone via micro transactions.... but i've never heard of anyone actually trying to do such a thing at scale.

sounds super cool if it could work... all the stuff i made, when reused somewhere by a company, i get a residual... the more valuable, the more used, and the more i get... that could be pretty awesome (hypothetically)

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#218

Post by Epiphany21 »

kragen wrote: post #135
marcodiego wrote: post #2

99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.

We should eliminate copyright. Zero years. Copyright was a reasonable bargain when printing a book involved a large up-front investment of typesetting it and then printing all the copies that would ever be printed from that setup. It didn't affect most people, just printers. And it enabled authors to make a living from writing. This held a fortiori for phonograph records. It became fairly dubious in the age of photoc…

There is still an up front cost associated with the creation of software or works that get distributed in a digital format. Even in the best case scenario where the hardware was free, the OS was free, and the software tools were free, the creator still has to spend his or her time on making the copyrighted work. They deserve to have options that allow them to be compensated for that labor. I reject the false dichotomy that states copyright law should continue to be abused or be done away with entirely.

The example you provided regarding the printing press resonates with me as an author. I have not included any form of DRM with the digital copies of my book and I won't go after individuals who pirate it. But, I will enforce my copyright on the work if a large company like Amazon tries to start selling it without my permission. When you say there should be no copyright, you're saying a giant corporation I want nothing to do with is entitled to profit off of three years of my labor, for free, without my consent.

There needs to be a more nuanced approach where laws are written and interpreted in a way that benefits regular everyday people. Abolishing copyright would do the opposite.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#220

Post by bena »

cgio wrote: post #182
bena wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in it for self-expression, you're entirely free to self-express to your heart's content. Copyright doesn't matter, publishers don't matter, studios don't matter. The minute you want to express yourself to others, you're no longer in it for self-expression. And regardless of your opinion on what should and should not exist, people should be fairly compensated for their endeavors, even if those endeavors are…

How were artists living before copyrights? We’ve had quite a few of them delivering masterpieces. So we can reward efforts the same ways as before, art will not die just be less profitable maybe. If reproduction is easy what do we as a society earn by making it harder artificially? I don’t believe any other worker is having these benefits. You do your job, paid for your effort by someone willing to do so, and then go…

Through patronage and performance. And since reproduction was difficult, you had to have these people around. You couldn't pick and choose among a thousand SoundCloud composers to find a song you liked. You needed a Mozart or Bach. You needed orchestras because recordings don't exist.

But now, it is dead simple to propagate someone's work once they've finished the act of creation.

And this isn't a discussion if others are getting their fair due. Even if they are not, it does not mean we should shaft everyone. Everyone should be fairly compensated for their work. But not enforcing some level of protection for the creation of art is pretty much ensuring no one is compensated for their work. Fairly or not.

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