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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

#121

Post by legulere »

Aerroon wrote: post #112
WalterBright wrote: post #94

Germany didn't have patent laws in the 1800s. Their economy rapidly industrialized and boomed. I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things better if they couldn't patent it? Note that Tesla open sources its patents.

The benefit of patents is that you have to make your patent public. After the patent runs out anybody can reproduce what you patented exactly like your did. The problem, of course, is that many companies see patents as a way to rent-seek. Establish enough patents in your niche and now nobody can compete with you. This is particularly a problem in the modern world where technological advancements have accelerated so m…

That's the idea behind it. The reality is that patents are written in a way to reveal as few as possible while blocking other companies as much as possible.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#122

Post by wredcoll »

saltyoldman wrote: post #118
theragra wrote: post #2

As 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 always funny seeing these threads, when it's about AI these people defend copyright to the death. Then when it's about a private IP owner holding onto their IP, it's "death to copyright"

AI involves a large corporation profiting from violating current copyeight standards in a way that enriches a small minority while appearing to harm to large majority, as well as being hypocritical.

Random people arguing for expanded public domain is not the same thing.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#123

Post by cedilla »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #111
theragra wrote: post #2

As 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.

Copyright for nearly everything but software, is primarily a question of "can I reproduce this other person's creative work?". Fair use doctrine is so broad that I think it most everything else falls under most people's accepted "artists deserve to be compensated for their work" gut instinct. If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the…

Fair use is much more narrow than most people think, it's just that most rights-holders are not very belligerent. For example, streaming video games does not fall under fair right, most video essays critiquing films or series use way too much material commentated for fair right, remixing as a whole is not fair use, and most fan works are definitely not fair use. Legal protections don't help here, but the shit-storms companies like Nintendo of America had to endure when they tried to tighten the screws.

And that's in the US, other countries have similar exceptions but they are also usually quite limited.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#124

Post by jcranmer »

estimator7292 wrote: post #119
jcranmer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years after the first book was published.

[flagged]

The ultimate purpose of copyright is to protect creators from the rapacious publishing industry. Now, it doesn't do a good job of it, in large part because the publishers have twisted it to mostly be a tool for publishers attacking publishers rather than creators to retain their rights.

But how much better would it be for creators if you gave those rapacious publishers the unconditional right to screw them over if they just wait 5 years (given production lead times)? You're taking away essentially the only lever creators have over some of the greediest capitalists imaginable, and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that's going to improve the lives of creators.

> Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity

Funny that you think I think this. No, I think the ideal copyright term is somewhere around 50 years. When you make it too short, you end up incentivizing publishers to screw over their creators as the copyright term will mostly be eaten up by the time it takes to produce something in the first place.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#125

Post by otherme123 »

input_sh wrote: post #100
otherme123 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think that the whole world is waiting for whatever the US say to make their laws? Spain copyright law is dated 1879: https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-1879-40001 , based on the French _droit d'auteur_ laws of 1700's. About the matter being discused here, read Artículo 6: dead date + 80.

No I do not think it's an original concept of the US, more that it was the US that conditioned many other countries to adopt similar laws as a condition for trade deals / investments. As a concept it existed in one way or the other pretty much ever since the printing press.

It is not difficult to find that the "US conditioning other countries in the 1970's" actually started in 1886 at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention when 10 european countries agreed on legal principles to protect original works. Among these 10, France, Germany, Italy, France and UK, so in practice the whole Western Europe. US didn't join until 1989.

The original treaty, if I am not misunderstanding here: https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/berne/summary_berne includes a "dead + 50 recomended" protection since the 1908 revision, before that it was up to each country laws, and in 1948 it changed to "dead + 50 minimum mandatory". In 1993 it was raised to "dead + 70" in the UE, to be followed by the US with the same extension in 1988 in Sonny Bono Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#126

Post by freejazz »

wang_li wrote: post #87
freejazz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are premised on complete misunderstanding.

There is a legally protected right of publicity. You cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their permission.

In some states, yeah, but it is not a copyright and has nothing to do with copyright.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#127

Post by freejazz »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #3
theragra wrote: post #2

As 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.

How often do you see the US enforcing copyrights?

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#128

Post by freejazz »

notarobot123 wrote: post #51
cestith wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a disincentive to authors in their later years if it’s a straight rule. We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something.

Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding your only motivation to create or share anything is the opportunity to extract as much value from society as possible.

I don't see anyone here judging you for going to work and wanting to be compensated for your efforts. But suddenly authors are "extract[ing] as much value from society as possible"? That's just rude. If we're being honest, it's much better for society that an author gets that money than someone working at Facebook.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#129

Post by observationist »

estimator7292 wrote: post #119
jcranmer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years after the first book was published.

[flagged]

In a world of print media and books, 20 year copyright makes sense; it gives the media time to disperse through the population, saturate, have whatever impact it will on the culture, and throughout that time, the originator can profit.

In a world where distribution of a novel the size of War and Peace takes less than a one second download, there's no value beyond gatekeeping and exclusivity that publishers and platforms can provide, and those are arbitrary and artificially imposed, and entirely unnecessary.

Copyright is fundamentally a ceding of power by a society to individuals, granting them permission to claim sole ownership of their writings for a period of time, preventing other people and institutions from plagiarizing the work. We, society, cede the right to freely exchange information in deference to the creators of different media so they have the opportunity to profit from it.

The value of media is independent from the commercial activity which copyright protects. Someone attempting to claim authorship of public domain works might do it better, or maybe they make it worse.

There's no other purpose to copyright when the internet exists. We've seen nearly 4 decades of what this sort of system does; it allows those with lots of resources and lawyers to extort and exploit those without on technicalities and gotchas. It enriches and rewards middlemen assholes without concurrent return of value to society. It results in brainless reshashes and remakes and protected IP franchises into milquetoast formulaic omnislop. Any sort of actual creativity and variety gets suppressed or outcompeted or even legally squashed, even on the off chance that it might negatively impact sales. Books and films get destroyed as tax writeoffs. Artists get their music and writing and entire life work hoarded away by some massive multibillion dollar corporation, and sometimes even left to rot and fade away to dust, never to appear again.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Your idea of a copyright system has been tried, and it has failed. It's time to update to a system which works in the world which is.

Re: Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees

#130

Post by reedciccio »

jcranmer wrote: post #98
observationist wrote: post #57

Earlier 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…

So what you're saying is that you think George R R Martin should not see a dime of revenue from the hit TV series made off of his books? Because Game of Thrones came out 20 years after the first book was published.

Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.
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