Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music • Hacker News Board

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#241

Post by marcus_holmes » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:25 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #235

autoexec wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that artists can't stop themselves from creating, but I think that a reasonable amount of protection still does encourage more works. Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made. Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated.…

IMO, copyright is something that should be shorter the bigger the media producer is. The reason we need a copyright in the first place is to stop someone like disney just vacuuming up popular works and republishing them because they have the money to do it. Disney, however, doesn't need almost any copyright to still encourage them to make new products. They'll do that regardless. For an individual author, copyright s…

This always pisses me off.

Disney didn't invent (e.g.) Beauty and the Beast. They took an idea and a story in the public domain and retold it. Then they claim ownership of that and sue anyone who uses the same character(s) for the next 75+ years.

This is not "encouraging creation". This is strip-mining our shared culture.

So yeah, agree 100% that this kind of corporate theft needs to be stopped. I can't see that happening in the face of all the money though.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#242

Post by acomjean » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:27 AM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #92

acomjean wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can’t IP be sold to a company that is “alive” for as long as it’s financially viable. I always wonder when copyright runs out for artist who sold their collections to companies.

> I always wonder when copyright runs out for artist who sold their collections to companies. This question is straightforward to answer with a single web search, so if you "always wonder" try looking. In this case it's the creator , not the owner .

what if the creator is a company? They are allowed to hold copyrights.

Though one answers is: 95/120 years.

"If the work is a joint work, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire and anonymous or pseudonymous works, copyright protection is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter"

https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#243

Post by Arainach » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:38 AM UTC

acomjean wrote: post #242

Arainach wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always wonder when copyright runs out for artist who sold their collections to companies. This question is straightforward to answer with a single web search, so if you "always wonder" try looking. In this case it's the creator , not the owner .

what if the creator is a company? They are allowed to hold copyrights. Though one answers is: 95/120 years. "If the work is a joint work, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire and anonymous or pseudonymous works, copyright protection is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter" https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

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Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#244

Post by ndriscoll » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #20

tracker1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't bought a Sony labelled product since... though I may or may not have consumed Sony content. They've definitely lost more than they gained.

> They've definitely lost more than they gained. That's a pretty good sized ego you got yourself there. The number of people that cared about the rootkit in the general populace was insignificant to Sony. Only tech nerds like us even knew about the rootkit or how insane it was to use. Unless you were a huge flagship purchaser of Sony's latest/greatest each year, they don't even notice you when you buy a TV or any oth…

They faced multiple lawsuits and had to do product recalls, so clearly they lost something. What exactly did they gain? IIRC you could avoid it by just turning off autoplay in Windows (which any sane person already did, or you could hold shift I think), and they were otherwise valid audio CDs (otherwise they wouldn't work in players), so it did exactly nothing to stop the CDs from being ripped and shared. And back then everyone knew about p2p so it really only took one person ripping it for it to spread. So even ignoring the lawsuits, even one person boycotting them probably makes it a net loss. Actually the development costs probably made it a loss.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#245

Post by RiverCrochet » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:48 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #123

thot_experiment wrote: post #9

A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.

[flagged]

The constitutionally defined purpose of copyright is:

"... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

I don't understand how "person X created this so anyone who does something similar has to pay him and his kin for all eternity" promotes progress. In fact, it does the exact opposite - at some point you can't do or say anything through any persistent media without paying legions of lawyers, trusts, and corporate entities.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#246

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:51 AM UTC

RiverCrochet wrote: post #245

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The constitutionally defined purpose of copyright is: "... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." I don't understand how "person X created this so anyone who does something similar has to pay him and his kin for all eternity" promotes progress. In fact, it does the exact opposite - at…

You could always create something on your own instead…

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#247

Post by autoexec » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 12:56 AM UTC

chipdale wrote: post #166

autoexec wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a horrible idea. There's zero benefit to society in letting corporations like Disney that can afford to pay keep works out of the public domain longer than others.

> There's zero benefit to society Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded? In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever becau…

> Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?

I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.

I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"

Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)

The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#248

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 1:05 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #191

WarmWash wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that that judgement was made in 1981, it's possible that the judges (who were likely a bunch of depression era old dudes) had zero knowledge or exposure, and had never even thought much about, personal video recording before a bunch of lawyers tried to explain it to them during the case. We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.

Judges asking things that are obvious to us make for great headlines and quotes, like "what is a website?" or "what is an API?" and "shows" how out of touch they are, but like a judge (trying to) define pornography, making sure the plaintiff, the defendant, and the judge are on the same page seems to me (I am not a lawyer) just good procedure. First everyone has to agree on what a website or an API is before passing…

Yeah, that makes sense. For the purposes of this court case we’re trying today, is an FTP server a website because you can view it in a browser? An Nginx server pointing to an empty directory? One that only returns 404s? One that only accepts POST and not GET? And is a website an API, because an automated client could send a request and get back a machine-parsable result? Is a JSON response an API? An XML response? An XHTML response? An RSS feed? An RSS feed that’s dynamically generated in response to query parameters?

Lots of things seem facepalmingly obvious until you start exploring the edges.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#249

Post by Henchman21 » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

bahmboo wrote: post #216

pavon wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ninth Circuit court of appeals understood correctly what the primary use of Betamax would be, but they believed that personal home recording was not fair use, and was thus copyright infringement. They interpreted the law as only allowing libraries to record TV or radio broadcasts. The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gon…

This speaks to first principles. I don't want judges making law - and any good judge doesn't want to make law. Laws are from elected legislatures. Of course this is all wishful thinking.

Isn't "judges making law" a key feature of common law systems? IANAL, obviously, I would know the answer to such a basic question if I were. But this is my understanding, and given that this case is in the US and the US is based on common law, I'm genuinely curious if you're advocating the US change to civil law?

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#250

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 1:09 AM UTC

xoa wrote: post #31

thot_experiment wrote: post #9

A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.

I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be aroun…

I still believe IP shouldn’t be protected by courts unless property taxes are paid on it. The IP holder should declare its taxable value, and that value should be its declared value in an infringement lawsuit. Oh, you said that movie was worth $1 for tax purposes? Now you can’t sue for more than $1 if someone copies it. You want to sue for $1B in damages? Ok, but plan on paying taxes on $1B.