181–190 of 383 posts
The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales. Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living. I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to t…
Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.
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This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
What you describe would almost certainly be considered fair use until point of distribution - it’s non commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact on the market value of Harry Potter. Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while I’m not a lawyer it feels like it’d be a hard case to make that work being conducted in private is going to have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew nove…
Simply writing new adventures for existing copyrighted characters is usually treated as creating an unauthorized derivative work. Writing Harry Potter from the perspective of the Weasley twins, for example, is not fair use.
Distribution is one part of fair use but it isn't the focus of it - fair use is a defense against infringement, but it's still infringement.
You're really missing the crux of fair use:
"Noncommercial, educational, critical, or transformative uses (like commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research)"
How closely does writing Harry Potter fanfiction align with commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research?
Fair use is more about: writing a critique about Harry Potter. Or a Weird Al style song about it. Or presenting parts of it in a paper you're writing for class.
This is all easily searchable stuff. Copyright is extremely draconian when you really look into it.
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“Copying” here refers to distribution and derivation, at least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of media for personal usage for instance (so long as you aren’t circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
Something about this page doesn't seem to work for me. Clicking the tiles doesn't do anything. It's not ad-blocker-related, I disabled those to test.
Even if it did work it's a bad UX. Just give us a list we can easily read.
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So where can a mainstream consumer purchase or borrow a paperback edition of those stories?
I mean https://www.printingcenterusa.com/printing/book-printing
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Have you noticed how the abundance of fan fictions have completely killed famous book series? Me neither.
No, but I think it might happen if copyright lapsed in 14 years.
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I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off? So many ideas better than the current regime.
I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al. The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits. Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (publish…
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It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it. But there might be populist support for…
I don't think the problem is most people being against shorter copyright terms but simply them not caring. I don't think a compromise with the devil will change anything about that.
Whereas, for the "pay to extend copyright" thing, you have a minority of opinionated geeks and at least a little wider net of people who see the irrationality of not being able to watch a movie from 40 years ago that nobody's making any money off of any more, and politicians seeing a new source of tax revenue that doesn't affect voters; against it you have, "a minority of massively rich entrenched interests fighting for something not making them any money". There's at least a chance of winning this one.
IOW, the choice is not, "Should we have 14+14 no extensions, or should we have pay-to-extend?" The choice is, "Should we have pay-to-extend, or the status quo?"
The length of copyright is absurd. Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales. Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood. But also, people need to make a living. I actually think the original 14+14 year copyright is the right balance. It gives people time to make their profits, but also guarantees the right of people to t…
I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.
As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.
An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.