I hate how copyright now lasts indefinitely. There are many papers from the 50's by people who are dead, and these companies are still claiming ownership over them. Copyright should last a relatively short time, and maybe be even shorter if you don't pay a fee to get it extended. Perhaps even a special exemption for scientific research.
If you could read all papers published 10 years ago for free, that would be incredible, even if it still cost $35 to read a new paper.
>1959 was another noteworthy year for science. C. P. Snow presented The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, an influential lecture about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. The programming language COBOL was developed. Martin Gardner published the Three Prisoners Problem, a probability theory paradox, in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communications, a foundational work for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the journal Nature.
>If you follow the link from Nature above (and you do not have a subscription or institutional access), you will see that this 1959 article is behind a paywall. You can purchase it for $32. A distressing number of scientific articles from 1959 require payment or a subscription or account, including those in major journals such as Science and JAMA. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is not guaranteed—even institutions such as Harvard have considered canceling their subscriptions because they could no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.
I wish they'd just acknowledge that Disney really, really wants to keep their IP forever, and just make a "Disney Exemption" -> if you're willing to pay all the money you would normally pay lobbyists to lobby to keep copyright perpetual, you get to keep your IP. Otherwise, you only get X number of years, period. That way we can stop artificially extending copyright terms just to make one corporation happy and ruining public domain for everyone else.
I know some people really want to make Disney play by everyone's rules, but they just have too much damn money and influence. At least they do tend to revive their old IP and not just let it sit there to rot indefinitely, like so many other companies.
At least then other IP is not negatively affected. Now it's just Disney trying to save Disney money, whereas the rest of the IP properly goes into public domain.
Maybe your pragmatic approach is right but I don't think I could settle for "we'll do this for this company because our politicians are easily bought". The real solution seems to be to get politicians with better ethics or create laws that force them to comply with good morals ... then of course you need a strong judiciary.
Ah yes, the "if only we voted in the right politicians". My Dad likes to make this argument till he's blue in the face, and those people never get elected (and it's a different set of people for every individual, I bet you'd disagree with most of his choices).
Of course it would fix things if all the right people got elected. But this is the real world, and that reality almost never, ever happens. It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!"
The main reason I don't hold out much hope for my solution either is because most corporations don't believe they'd have much to gain from limited copyright, focusing too much on what they'd lose, rather than what they'd gain, from being able to use so many newer IP without paying licensing fees.
>It's much easier to get specific protections passed, especially ones that benefit one or more corporations, than it is to make sure "no one gets elected whose vote can be bought and believes in things different from me!" //
It's a very good thing when people get elected who have different beliefs to me as I'm not always right.
Also, a politician who sides with me because of a "bribe" is not a good thing IMO; it rather suggests that I'm on the side that can't win through fair play, or indeed that I'm on the side that favours those corrupt enough to pervert democracy in their favour because of their wealth.
I don't think there's any evidence to show that a copyright term less than life will damage artists, nor reduce impetus to create works. Indeed works entering the public domain appear to stimulate creative work.
I don't agree with your "too rich to legislate against the preference of" arguments for Disney. Indeed their wealth suggests strongly that the balance between public protected monopoly and free use of works has been lost.
Like in programming, there are upsides and downsides too!
While you spend your time rewriting your code in Rust, your competitor launches with a hackier version and your market opportunity is gone. Or maybe you don't rewrite it, and you end up with a buggy platform that's difficult to scale, while your competitor with a rock solid alternative starts to win your customers.
Pragmatism is always advised, but there is a cost and benefit trade off between pragmatism and idealism.
Although copyright technically is limited in term [1], it is practically forever, as in I will never see a work created today go into the public domain. Next time a bill is introduced to extend copyright term, I think the community should speak out against it.
I'm helping a startup in the grassroots lobbying space to improve how citizens can effect change. Turns out elected officials really do care a lot about their constituents, more so on average than lobbyists. Unfortunately it's hard to get the contact information for the staffers of these elected officials and it's hard to know if the supporters of a cause live in the right district that the elected representative represents.
Anyway, the platform makes this all easy and is going live this summer. If anyone does represent a special interest and wants to help beta test for free email hn (at) strapr (dot) com
If you could read all papers published 10 years ago for free, that would be incredible, even if it still cost $35 to read a new paper.
See the science section here: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2016/pre-1976
>1959 was another noteworthy year for science. C. P. Snow presented The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, an influential lecture about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. The programming language COBOL was developed. Martin Gardner published the Three Prisoners Problem, a probability theory paradox, in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published Searching for Interstellar Communications, a foundational work for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in the journal Nature.
>If you follow the link from Nature above (and you do not have a subscription or institutional access), you will see that this 1959 article is behind a paywall. You can purchase it for $32. A distressing number of scientific articles from 1959 require payment or a subscription or account, including those in major journals such as Science and JAMA. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is not guaranteed—even institutions such as Harvard have considered canceling their subscriptions because they could no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.