Then I think we are in violent agreement. People who say “copyright has gotten out of control” or “is the cost worth it to society” largely are complaining about the current state of copyright where it lasts generations in my experience. Nobody hates the creator of culture they love, the hate the lawyers strangling anyone’s ability to participate in that culture in any way other than as a consumer. If we turned back the clock to 1975 levels of protection, we would get a public domain again which is good for creators, and creators would still have long periods to profit off their labor. The next Disney could be born as the first Disney was, by remixing the rich public domain. Of course that wouldn’t be good for the current disney monopoly and so it’s unlikely to happen.
True. But the reason why we talk about Public Domain so positively is that we view it as there being so much creativity that is contained for 70+ years for no reason.
It's starting to turn out, and I fear the perception is getting set, that almost all of that creativity is garbage, or at least perceived as such by a growing percentage of people.
Seriously though, if I was Disney, I'd bankroll secretly as much garbage public domain content about Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse as possible. I'd then lobby Congress for infinitely renewable copyright. I then get to frame every Senator opposed as supporting horror content for kids. Fun.
1973 was almost 40 years ago. You should not have the right to profit from your work forever. 40 years is more than enough time. As such, I don't feel the least bit compelled by the second part of your argument. If Disney goes broke because Steamboat Willie has finally entered the public domain and is blatantly copied in Russia, I don't think anyone is going to shed a tear.
I don't really have a good solution. My gut reaction is that having a system that rewards the same companies that pushed for infinite copyright duration, rather than removing their hold over our shared culture, isn't a good solution. That isn't the most pragmatic of me, but I'd rather not reward Disney for breaking the public domain.
On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n × number of works) every year.
Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big company and you want to own your stuff forever. But behind the laws protecting those companies there's a ton of stuff that the owner doesn't care, nobody even knows who the owner is, etc. etc. (There's a lot of stuff that is de facto in the public domain because nobody owns it anymore in any practical sense, but there's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly steep fee for the benefit.
Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything produced ever.
If disney lost the copyright on their older works and copyright law started expiring after 20 or 50 years instead of the 100 plus today, I would consider this a good thing.
People who make billions of dollars from the status quo have great power to maintain the status quo.
The problem with the copyright lobbyism is that it affects not just Disney but everyone else. Right now nothing will ever reach the public domain through copyright expiration.
It would be okay if copyright law had a short duration like 10 years but a way to extend the copyright term by another 10 years for a flat fee that keeps up with inflation. It doesn't have to be an increasing fee. The point of this fee is to check whether a business can still extract money out of their IP. If they can't then release it to the public domain.
If Mickey Mouse is a cash cow that lasts forever then so be it.
There are analyses that say many contradictory things. I haven't read that analysis and don't know whether I would think much of it. But let's suppose that if I did then I would be convinced that the economic effects of copyright extension are better understood as that type of protectionism.
That doesn't change the fact that I still have evidence that Disney is explicitly involved both directly and indirectly in lobbying for copyright extension. And they start lobbying for it like clockwork as soon as Steamboat Willie starts threatening to slide into public domain.
Therefore no matter what the economic arguments, I believe that the people actually changing the rules are changing it to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright.
That said, I think little of the position taken in that analysis. It claims that the public is forced to buy potentially-inferior modern IP. To the contrary, I believe that the public is free to not buy IP at all, but instead to find other ways to entertain themselves. In fact I believe that if modern authors and artists could freely draw on iconic past IP, they could create compelling new works drawing on the old ones which would increase consumption of IP. Thereby making the public happier AND content creators richer.
Therefore I believe that the net effect of copyright extension is to increase the rent that current content owners can get from past content at the cost of both the public and current content creators. (And yes, this holds true even though there are content creators employed by content owners.)
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As to "nobody benefits much", I remember one of the briefs that I saw for Eldred v. Ashcroft that demonstrated that over 99% of the possible present value of a work is captured by the author under the terms of the 1976 law. That is, if we take the possibility of public domain away and assign perpetual copyright to authors, we will not add more than about 1% to the compensation authors can expect.
Turning that figure around, today's content creators would be better off with the 1976 laws if they in aggregate could increase consumed commercial content by more than 1% from having full access to past content to work from. (Exactly like Walt Disney did with works like Sleeping Beauty.) I believe that this is quite possible. A number of economic experiments have found that increasing availability of free content increases consumption and ultimately increases revenue to artists. See, for example, http://www.baen.com/library/prime_palaver1.asp for one of them.
This would just mean that rich companies/people will get to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this whole situation where things don't enter the public domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.
Then you don't understand why copyright was created.
It's not there to give forever and ever protection. It's there to allow you to get some money before society, which made your product worth something in the first place, can incorporate it into culture where it belonged in the first place.
Disney themselves love using other people stories constantly, but no-one can use theirs for extreme amounts of time because they've distorted the meaning of copyright.
There's no good reason for someone else's ideas to be protected, it doesn't benefit society at all. Copyright should be 10-15 years, not this ridiculous century.
Apart from America as it exports the stuff, so, surprise, surprise, they've bullied the rest of the world into making stupidly long copyrights so that everything created in the last century is languishing in untouchable hell so a few big brands can continue making money off things that should be public domain.
This is strange conflicted space for me. Were this the case, Disney would have had to produce nothing but original work, which would probably benefit us today but would leave us without the eventual cultural heritage that they produced (if it can ever be pulled from their claws). I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that public domain is very much like other idealogical freedoms I was raised to believe in, which is to say beautiful conceptually but possibly messy and requiring potentially painful sacrifices on the part of individuals if consistency with the ideal is the goal.
Copyright was never meant to give perpetual rights, which is what your scheme would do (as it does now). So might as well not change the current system, because the conclusion is the same.
The final arbiter was never "does it have commercial value still?" until today. That's a purely modern perspective pushed by companies like Disney, because of course it is. That's all they care about. We don't have to care about that. In fact, I'd suggest it's completely immoral to accept that framing when we look at how important public domain has historically been to our culture.
That's my point though. Society shouldn't own IP just because it is old and we got used to it. We should protect the IP's rightful owners until the rightful owners are gone from this Earth. You're acting as if you're defending our children's children's children by wanting Mickey Mouse forced into the public domain. This isn't a matter of 'evil megacorps' robbing our children of something precious.
I always feel like the right solution would be to have a significantly shorter copyright duration, but make it extendable for a large and increasing annual fee.
I don't care if Disney gets to keep the rights to Mickey Mouse. The real problem is all the other stuff that gets swept along in the bargain.
Revert copyright back to the original 28 years and Disney's increasing domination of the media market becomes less of a concern. Of course this probably won't happen because the US and other world governments exist to serve Disney and their shareholders, but it's the easiest way to fix this that doesn't involve a long and complicated antitrust case that the government might lose in the courts.
If you want to be even more daring and spend a little bit of public money, you could have a publicly financed streaming service with most major public domain works. You could make it available through the Library of Congress.
The current copyright system is beyond messed up. Locking up IP for multiple generations is just downright pro-corporate nonsense, and we mostly have Disney to thank for it.
No, I think that is the opposite of what makes sense. We should allow popular properties that have already provided good profits for their creators to lapse as soon as possible into the public domain, since they have the largest impact on culture, and the lowest impact on their creators' livelihoods.
Mickey Mouse is much more relevant, would lead to much more creative work, and would hurt Disney much less if it were public than making some song by some band which at best has a small dedicated following public.
The incentives still exist in the present, even given a future when the creative artists are long dead. The ability to pass the rights down to descendants and the increase in the value of rights for the purposes of selling them to obtain cash can be significant incentives in the present.
That Disney is hypocritical in their support of extended copyrights is irrelevant. What we are left with is a law, which independent of how it was passed exists now. As rayiner points out -- what is the motivation for repealing it. Once we consider copyrights a form of property, it seems tenuous to put arbitrary limitations on them that do not apply to other forms of property.
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