Yes, please. I'd argue for all copyrights to expire at 20 years after publication. The idea that there's a perpetual right to intellectual "property" is a very dangerous one to a free society and to freedom of expression. There's no inherent right to own ideas. That's a legal construct created to encourage sharing of those ideas.
But the idea that a 20-year limit is too short to encourage authors and musicians and game developers to create new creative work is ludicrous. If anything, the essentially unlimited copyright of today encourages less creative output and less innovation. Why develop any new characters or stories if you've got multiple generations worth of copyright left to go? Keep pumping out the sequels.
Here's an additional idea to shorter copyright periods (not mutually exclusive). Weaken protection for a copyrighted item over its duration.
For example, when the subject is first copyrighted, it enjoys all the protections we have today, but say at different time periods (6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc.) more things become fair use or public domain.
As a simple example, take a copyrighted song. When first registered, it would have all the protections known today. But suppose that after awhile, the allowed cases of fair use are extended.
So at a certain point still within the copyright period, people may be able to use certain bars of the song. And eventually people might be able to do their own covers of the song, perhaps more/earlier fair use is granted for those not earning money on it, e.g. your YouTube fan videos. And at a certain point, people can start using parts of the song in other works that are not wholly dependent on the song, such as use in a background track to a small segment in in a YouTube video like the credits out-tro.
Covers are allowed because they are performed in venues with ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC licenses - http://www.ascap.com/licensing/licensingfaq.aspx. Covers performed in public in a venue without one of these licenses are not explicitly allowed.
No. You. Do. Not. It's called a mechanical license.
"Since the Copyright Act of 1909, United States musicians have had the right to record a version of someone else's previously recorded and released tune, whether it's music alone or music with lyrics.[7] A license can be negotiated between representatives of the interpreting artist and the copyright holder, or recording published tunes can fall under a mechanical license whereby the recording artist pays a standard royalty to the original author/copyright holder through an organization such as the Harry Fox Agency, and is safe under copyright law even if they do not have any permission from the original author. Other agents who can facilitate clearance include Limelight, the online mechanical licensing utility powered by RightsFlow. The U.S. Congress introduced the mechanical license to head off an attempt by the Aeolian Company to monopolize the piano roll market.[8]"
You just quoted something saying exactly what I said, while acting like you disagree. Once again, a license is special permission. That is precisely what it is, that is the whole point. Saying "you don't have to have special permission because you get special permission" is insane.
Sync licenses (eg to sync a song with video) require the songwriter's explicit consent in every case, but while a license fee is required to re-record a particular song, explicit consent is not required. That's why one-hit wonders' songs are often hard to find on places like iTunes or Amazon MP3 Store if you don't know the performing artist's name, because anyone can cover it, and there are entire operations who make a business out of producing terrible covers of popular songs to get some accidental purchases.
Any artists who haven't allowed their recordings to make it to electronic distribution are also drowned in poor covers online. AC/DC was a great example of this problem until they finally gave in and released their stuff digitally. There's still a ton of AC/DC cover recordings on iTunes.
I happened to know about the mechanical license, but didn't realize it had been extended to covers.
But this is really beside the original point. The point is that copyright was intended to promote the progress of science/arts/knowledge and there are a lot of things right now that don't fall into fair use and hinders progress.
Here are some other examples. Many years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream, fan websites of TVs and movies were getting cease and desist letters because they had pictures of the actors in their roles on their websites. Technically this is still a violation, but most companies now at least have the sense to turn a blind eye. You'll see even on Wikipedia, there are a lot of reservations of posting a screenshot of a tv show, movie, or video game because of this.
Another random example is fan fiction. This seems like it would be a good candidate for rules to relax over time. At first, fan fiction may more restricted because the original authors may in fact want to write their own sequels. But over the course of time the work enters the public stream of consciousness and progress via things like fan fiction should be allowed instead of hunted down and destroyed.
Another example comes from an actual case law I can't remember the details from, but a book essentially about 'The most important things you should know when dating a Trekkie'. It made references to episodes in Star Trek so they got sued. Because it didn't directly parody Star Trek, it didn't fall under fair use. If I recall, the book lost the case. Again, since Star Trek has been deeply absorbed into the culture, it makes sense that copyright protection needs to weaken over time to allow more ideas/expression instead of hinder them. (A related topic might be the subtle distinction between parody and satire which is also currently a problem in current copyright law.)
I wouldn't even mind a compromise where anyone who paid a small extension fee could keep copyright going. That way Disney, Bono, etc could keep their own copyrights without messing things up for every other copyrighted work.
This idea is floated quite often in reformist discussions of copyright, but I think it would be a huge headache.
I have worked with public domain material quite a bit. Currently, anything published in the United States prior to 1923 is in the public domain in the United States [1][2]. Some works published after 1923 are also in the public domain if they meet certain conditions (e.g. a work published in 1925 with a copyright notice where the copyright was never renewed), but it can be an extreme headache to work out which post-1923 works are in copyright and which are not.
Although I am in no way a fan of the current system, it at least has the advantage of clarity for pre-1923 works.
In a proposed system of copyright extension, renewal or terms that are in other ways modifiable on a per-work basis, establishing whether or not works are still in copyright would become an absolute nightmare. Consider that, in the US, copyright applies to any eligible creative work at the moment it is "created and fixed in a tangible form" [3]. In the internet age, millions or billions or works are created each day that are protected by copyright. Most of these works do not have a title and will never be registered anywhere, but copyright applies none the less. A central registry of copyrighted works is impossible, much less a registry that records the specific extensions or renewal term on a per-work basis.
In my opinion, the only possible system that can work is one based on fixed lengths of time. If copyright is extendable, the large majority of works will fall into a legal grey area where it is unclear whether or not the copyright has been extended and almost impossible to find out. Under such a system, the only safe approach to handling copyrighted works would be to assume each work had had its copyright extended to the maximum term possible under law, unless it was provable that was not the case (which, as I have argued, would be extremely difficult).
Under a fixed-term system, it is simple to work out whether or not most works are still copyrighted, even in cases where the title, author of record or copyright holder are not identifiable.
[1] There may be some obscure exceptions to this rule, but it holds broadly enough that I have never encountered any in practice.
A central registry of extended copyrights is not impossible; there's plenty of institutional inertia in government offices to assure continuity (USPTO has been around since 1871, Library of Congress since 1800), and the extension fees could easily pay for a database of works. Heck, we already do that with registered copyright.
It won't even be a large corpus; the works that anyone would care about after 30 years (or, in better concert with the current system, 70 years) would be rather manageable.
To eliminate "grey area", make the USPTO (or LoC or whatever) the final word on whether something is still registered. Ask 'em, they say "yes" or "no", and you're done. Instruct the registry to provide wide latitude in considering slightly different versions the same work to cut down on combinatorics.
It actually puts more of a book-keeping burden on the copyright owners than the government, but if you have 30 year+ still-producing assets, presumably you can manage such a slow-motion system.
It's not a perfect system, granted, but it's better than the alternative: eternal or eternally-extending copyright, with the original horizon being "Steamboat Willie". With a registered-renewal system, Disney can keep their crap and we can get the rest of the corpus.
(For bonus points, the registration fee increases with each renewal, to make sure you really think it's valuable. Powers of two would be nice.)
Why is it impossible? If they're paying for a copyright extension, shouldn't it be clear which works they are paying for? Anything not in the registry would fall under the shorter term.
It's not impossible, but it can be extremely difficult.
Consider a short story published in a literary journal last week. Allow a copyright system to exist that covers each eligible work for 30 years by default, and allows multiple extensions of 5 years at a cost of $1000 per extension per work, up to a total copyright term of 100 years.
Someone in 2047 discovers a copy of this particular journal issue, which has now become obscure. They identify that this short story, though never being given acclaim, has had a subtle yet profound cultural influence. They decide to republish the story in their own commercial magazine, but want to check if the copyright has been extended. If it has not, the story is in the public domain. If is has been extended, the story is still covered by copyright.
They can search the central registry for the title of the short story and the name of the author. But they also have to search for the names of the editors of the journal, because it isn't clear whether or not the copyright stayed with the author or was transferred to the journal as part of the submission process. In fact, the copyright might have been granted to the owner of the journal, which may be an individual or may be an institution. The entry for the copyright might be under the title of the short story, or under the title for the journal, or under the title of that particular issue of the journal.
Furthermore, the author of the story, if they retained the copyright, may have submitted the story under a pen name, and/or may have registered the copyright of the short story under a different title than the title they used to submit to the journal, or the title might have been changed by the editors.
Or, the author, after having the short story accepted by the journal, may have sold it to a publisher who published it in a short fiction anthology, the copyright for which is registered completely separately and is essentially invisible to our hypothetical future researcher.
Any of these agents might have extended the copyright. It would be extremely difficult to prove to a high degree of certainty that the story was or was not covered by copyright.
Violation of a registered copyright only carries punishment if "the" UUID of the work is registered and is contained in the work (byline, front page, whatever as appropriate). Doesn't actually matter if the UUID has any relationship to the work, although it would be nice if it did.
Example, This HN post from 2014 is registered copyright UUID 12345-23-242342 by VLM.
In 2097 simply check https://copyright.example/12345-23-242342 for current status. Instead of copyright.example, I hope they can think of a more intelligent international (interplanetary?) domain name, but the general idea holds.
Don't want copyright enforced on a work created in 2015, simply neglect to list the UUID you got at registration. I see no reason a registration should be expensive other than the usual crooks trying to eliminate competition. No technological reason.
False claim (intentional random numbers instead of valid registration) equals instant public domain.
Essentially this large integer is the title - registration ID - type of concept for this copyrighted media.
Personally I think it would be awesome if the title generator also stored licensing info. My panoramic landscape photo is not only registered to me, but is CC:NC. If you messed with the system you could force all UUID beginning with 0 to be all rights reserved, all UUID beginning with 9 to be CC:SA. Just keep on generating UUIDs until you get ASCII codes for C, C, S, and A as the first 4 bytes for a CC:SA UUID. Or the first 3 bytes being ASCII G, P, and L. Better be a long/wide UUID system.
UUID "contained in the work" would be troublesome in many mediums (music recordings, film, paintings, for instance). Perhaps "travels with the work" would be manageable though.
And it's worth considering that every tweet, every photo on Flickr, every video on YouTube, every status update on FB, and so on, constitutes a new copyrightable work. Not everyone will care about the copyrights of their tweets, but some will. How do you copyright something for which you have no control of the identifiers? I assume you don't intend for people to hit up the service for a new UUID before tweeting and embed the token in their tweet?
(Obviously this problem would go away if e.g. Twitter itself signed onto this scheme, automatically registering and UUIDing your tweets on your behalf.)
"Violation of a registered copyright only carries punishment"
Or if thats a non-starter just reduce all the penalties by 1e6 or perhaps 1e3 for violation of an untagged work.
Retweeting being a copyright violation, but if a REGEX doesn't find a UUID in there, the legal cost would be a micropayment transaction, so probably ignored.
I would have to re-read Berne to determine if this sneaks by on a technicality, or if Berne is simply culturally and technologically obsolete. Its a copyright treaty, not an economic suicide pact... can be worked around.
Since the digits in a UUID are independent, just overwrite the first characters to whatever you want. You don't have to keep generating random numbers.
Why can't you just type in a section (say, a paragraph) of the work and have a fuzzy search locate it, instead of relying on just the title and author? I think your situation is only difficult due to poor technology. Youtube can now identify even distorted sections of videos and audio against an huge catalog of works, why can't the copyright registry?
But then you would have to put a number on every work just in case you extend the copyright later. Otherwise you might have a 35-year-old work and have no idea if its copyright has been extended because it was not originally printed with a number.
>> Just give it a number and make protection contingent upon publication of same with the work.
> you might have a 35-year-old work and have no idea if its copyright has been extended because it was not originally printed with a number
No... if protection is contingent on publication of the number along with the work, then a work printed without a number is unprotected. There is no concept of "extending copyright" on a work that isn't even copyrighted.
Yes! Are you an EU citizen? If so, it would be great if you could voice your opinion in the ongoing consultation on the review of the EU copyright rules, currently held by the European Commision. Here's the link:
Even non-complete surveys will be considered and you can be sure your contribution will be read since the number of contributions is always relatively low.
The same goes for any other EU citizens on HN. Now is the time to make yourself heared!
Every one in "the public" has skin in the game, cuz, you know, it's their "domain" we are talking about. The very fact that people think that pushing stuff into the public domain is some sort of gift, or that the public has no say in the matter, is kind of the point of the post.
20 years EVERYTHING. Even for something like Photoshop, imagine the amount of choice a consumer would have if there were a thousand Photoshops out there by different companies. Microsoft could even make a Photoshop. It would be ridiculous but kind of awesome.
The same is true if we had maybe 10,000 Zelda games on the market. Imagining that is kind of weird. But the result is just awesome.
> Even for something like Photoshop, imagine the amount of choice a consumer would have if there were a thousand Photoshops out there by different companies. Microsoft could even make a Photoshop
First of all even if copyright was expired it doesn't mean access to source code.
Secondly, do you really think that having access to 20 year old version of Photoshop (source code or not) would be significant factor for anybody to enter the market? Making it work on modern systems would mean essentially a complete rewrite, at which point the original copyright would be irrelevant. Making it competitive would be probably more difficult with the original codebase than with a new clean design.
>First of all even if copyright was expired it doesn't mean access to source code.
Maybe it should. Registering a copyright already requires the submission of several copies of the work. Why shouldn't the source code necessary to produce that work be a required part of the submission? If the public is to be expected to take advantage of public domain works, they must have access to high quality versions in useful formats.
When is my work protected?
Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.
Do I have to register with your office to be protected?
No. In general, registration is voluntary. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. You will have to register, however, if you wish to bring a lawsuit for infringement of a U.S. work. See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “Copyright Registration.”
If I create a story it is automatically copyrighted (unless I specifically license it differently) however if I wanna sue, my copyright must be registered.
There is 1000 photoshops out there - they just don't use the name "photoshop". For a product like that the copyright doesn't really make a difference, except it might confuse customers.
But the idea that a 20-year limit is too short to encourage authors and musicians and game developers to create new creative work is ludicrous. If anything, the essentially unlimited copyright of today encourages less creative output and less innovation. Why develop any new characters or stories if you've got multiple generations worth of copyright left to go? Keep pumping out the sequels.