If I were to sell an app on the App Store called Mondrianify which made Mondrian-style pictures, would the Mondrian Trust demand the app be removed?
Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
71–80 of 171 posts
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
A human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are premised on complete misunderstanding.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention. Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
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Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain. Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first…
Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
The first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and 21 years for works already in production.
The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#75As 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.
0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain. Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first…
Anyone looking to start pirating check out fmhy.net (free media heck yeah)
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> while a piece of land pays property taxes. In some countries taxes are annual. In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
Council taxes are property taxes and are monthly.
They're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 e…
Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not for copyright... or for any other type of loss. People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case. The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant.…
Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some recovery from criminal proceedings.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain. Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first…
Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically.
Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.
This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.
It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.
No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.
Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.
No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.
The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not for copyright... or for any other type of loss. People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case. The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant.…
Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some recovery from criminal proceedings.
If a criminal case ever happens, it is a possibility that restitution can be awarded. But generally, if somebody's infringing your copyright and you want to seek damages, you need to bring a civil case yourself. Well over 99% of copyright cases are civil.
Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Real property owners also pay tax on their income. Income is taxed. Real property is taxed. Intellectual property is not.
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.
Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate.
Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot.
I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low.