101–110 of 260 posts
> giving creative workers more rights without addressing their market power is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money. There isn't an amount of lunch money you can give that kid that will buy them lunch – you're just enriching the bullies
> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, o…
> should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ... Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
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Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher. Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differen…
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.) Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator . You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN…
It's important to recognize why this is the case - a lot of the hubbub around posthumous copyright comes from the fact that a large amount of classic literature often went unrecognized during an author's lifetime (a classic example is Moby Dick, which sold and reviewed poorly - Melville only made 1260$ from the book in total and his wife only made ~800$ from it in the remaining 8 years it remained under copyright after Melville died, even though it's hard to not imagine it on a literature list these days). Long copyright terms existed to ensure that the family of an author didn't lose out on any potential sales that would come much later. Even more recent works, like Lord of the Rings also heavily benefitted from posthumous copyright, as it allowed Tolkien's son to actually make the books into the modern classics they are today, through carefully curating the rereleases and additions to the work (the map of Middle Earth for instance was drawn by Tolkien's son.)
It's mostly a historic example though; Copyright pretty blatantly just isn't designed with the internet in mind. Personally I think an unconditional 50 years is the right timeline for copyright to end. No "life+50"; just 50.
50 years of copyright should be more than enough to get as much mileage out of a work as possible, without running into the current insanity where all of the modern worlds cultural touchstones are in the hands of a few megacorporations. For reference, 50 years means that everything before 1975 would no longer be under copyright today, which seems like a much fairer length to me. It also means that if you create something popular, you have roughly the entire duration of a person's working life (starting at 18-23, ending at 65-70) to make money from it.
35 years seem quite excessive. Taking half your life to get your stuff back?
it's a double edged sword -- media companies are generally franchise/lifetime hits oriented businesses - they pay (and generally lose, per investment, btw) for a shot at a hit. On the one hand, imagine they could only negotiate rights to monetize that hit for, say, one year, and then this termination right kicked in. What do you think would be the top offer they could make an author? The fraction of creatives that ar…
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Wow, TIL. I had assumed that Warren Beatty was suffering from dementia due to his great age and his retirement from cinema. I had no idea he was still making media appearances.
You assume he has dementia because he’s old and retired?
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I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content. Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos. If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be…
> I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content. Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to s…
This is an incredibly good thing.
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> You have to wait half a lifetime?! I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us. With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought…
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
Not at all.
7% have uncertain lifetimes, >= (current value).
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> "Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit. > It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely". From my first post: > If you can sign them a…
> If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely. How do you define "swindle"?
If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).
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I can't keep selling it if you terminate the distribution right to some texture you made that I used in my game.
I don't think you are correct here. From the FAQ [0] on the website linked by the post: “Derivative works” exception – although a successful termination causes all of the rights to revert, this will not affect exploitation of derivative works created during the lifetime of the agreement, even after that agreement has been terminated. Once the agreement has been terminated, the grantee (see the glossary) may continue…
Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’.
Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL!
…although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)