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Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
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Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#42As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author. Even current regime is ridiculous.
"Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright.
The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.
Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The state isn’t enforcing your rights for free - you still have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself. The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so. This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
Copyright infringement in the United States has both civil and criminal elements at law.
Touché.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
You quote a section about unpublished work. The painting was published nearly a hundred years ago so the quote isn't relevant. If you think the article is wrong please state how.
I don’t see that. “For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed during the 28th year following publication” may not apply here, but if so, it isn’t because the work was published.
Is this a guessing game? Which specific claim in the article do you think is wrong? What do you think is the true situation?
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land. It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
This is actually a solved problem. It is self-assessed valuation with compulsory sale at declared value, known as the Harberger Tax.
The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of intellectual property, from people who can't afford to pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are willing to pay.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright infringement in the United States has both civil and criminal elements at law.
Touché. This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses. I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
Sometimes for physical property the police take it and the owner can get it back from them. That much is sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it I would have had to get it from the thief.
Often the property is never found and returned.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#47As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author. Even current regime is ridiculous.
It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for free - while a piece of land pays property taxes.
Land is scarce. Also, generally, property taxes are paid to the city/county that makes that land desirable to live in.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#48As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author. Even current regime is ridiculous.
Almost all works make all their money in the first five years after creation. 5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us. Fuck the copyright cartels.
Generative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of copyright to society.
There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.
Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.
These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?
What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright infringement in the United States has both civil and criminal elements at law.
Touché. This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses. I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I fully support copyright enforcement being funded by intellectual property taxes:
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#50As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author. Even current regime is ridiculous.
"Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright.
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