Meanwhile in Canada, a bunch of stuff will be leaving the public domain thanks to the renegotiation of NAFTA synchronizing Canadian copyright to American. Yay?
I don’t believe copyright should be abolished, I believe an Author of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work and exploit it for profit how they see fit. I also don’t believe that copyright destroys culture.
But I will agree that the time limit on such copyrights has gotten out of control and should be rained in. Disney had and exploited the benifits of copyrighted works entering the public domain. It’s only fair (IMO) they allow others to have such benefits available to themselves too.
If copyright lasted (say) a year or two - maybe. But even then, it's a terrible tool with huge social costs and limited upside. In any sane world, given the increased pace of information exchange and cultural change, copyright terms should have decreased over the years. That's not exactly what happened, now is it?
It's completely laughable to assume human culture would cease to develop in the absence of copyright; which is essentially it's stated aim. Evidence: the entirety of human history. The idea wasn't the brightest from the get go: this was lawmakers simply trying to be too clever.
But what bothers me most is the framing of "authors of a creative piece of work should have the right to protect their work"; when in fact it means "anybody or any organisation who made even rudimentary changes to almost any kind information can limit the rights of every other human on the planet". It's an absurdly blunt regulatory tool that's eminently vulnerable to regulatory capture, and oh hey; that actually happened many times over the centuries - and not just in terms of durations; it was expanded to corporations; penalties became more severe; exclusions were reduced; scope crept in the form of anti-circumvention measures; reach expanded by population growth and international cooperation.
Copyright and derivative laws in its modern form has to be up there as one of the worst forms of regulation, with huge economic and social costs, yet no good way out and no practical sunset clauses because of extremely entrenched habits and vested interests.
Copyright is there to help the creation of new works. Why should an author write a book or a studio produce a movie if literally everyone can freely copy it? (i.e. Book printers, DVD producers, Cinema's wouldn't have to pay the original producers). Producing creative work would be economically unviable.
That said, that's also its only justification, and current terms have long reached beyond that. There isn't a book that wasn't written in 1923 because it would be freely available in 2004, and if we shortened terms to 50 years it would have zero effect on the production of new works. Not a movie less will be made because its copyright expires in 2068 instead of 21xx.
And it's really much worse than that. The aim should never be for maximum production of IP "at all costs" - it should be for maximum benefit at minimum cost.
So if an IP horizon of (say) 30 years started to make a tiny but measurable impact on the kind of IP produced - then that's a sign that 30 years is likely waaaay too long! because the benefits are virtually nil, yet the costs are huge - not just culturally, but even economically, due to lack of competition (being an exclusionary right and all).
Not to mention there's this straw-man that the alternative to copyright is assumed to implicitly be a complete free-for all. I mean you could think up at least a dozen alternatives - like region limited copyrights; mandatory limited-price licensing; copyrights only for human beings, not legal entities; continually rising registration costs; production subsidies; citation and consumption based subsidies; retrospective rewards based on popular vote or a council of experts, etc etc etc - and you could easily use many of those ideas simultaneously - potentially including a very short old-style copyright term.
Also, technology has advanced somewhat since copyright came to be. Numerical models that would have been heinously impractical hundreds of years ago may now be trivially practical; i.e. accounting for each and every consumer of a piece of art may now actually be practical.
TL;DR: If society wants to support creators even at the cost to others - an entirely reasonable aim - it's a fallacy to compare copyright-as-is-today to anarchy.
> copyright terms should have decreased over the years. That's not exactly what happened, now is it?
I agree they should decrease and even said so in my post.
> It's completely laughable to assume human culture would cease to develop in the absence of copyright.
I didn't say it would and I don't believe it would either, but personally I believe if we got rid of all copyright laws tomorrow it would do more harm to smaller creatives than it would to the large corporate media outlets.
> anybody or any organisation who made even rudimentary changes to almost any kind information can limit the rights of every other human on the planet
If that is the case then you can take the source material they made changes to and base your work off that. Lets take Snow White as an example. I believe Disney currently still have copyright on their adaptation of the 19th century fairly tale (as the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" film came out in 1937). But as the original source material is in the public domain so you can take that original source material and adapt it for your own creation.
> it was expanded to corporations; penalties became more severe; exclusions were reduced; scope crept in the form of anti-circumvention measures; reach expanded by population growth and international cooperation.
These can be lowered (or expanded in the cause of exclusions) without having to remove the protection completely. I do believe the current system has flaws (I'm against the rules that prohibit users breaking DRM esp when it is for their own use, for being able to transcode media from one format to another for example). But as I said I am against removing all the protections outright.
> I believe Disney currently still have copyright on their adaptation of the 19th century fairly tale (as the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" film came out in 1937). But as the original source material is in the public domain so you can take that original source material and adapt it for your own creation.
This is technically true, but in practice the effort necessary to avoid infringing on Disney's parts of things has a really clear chilling effect on derivative use of the original public domain work.
Really only other large corporations with deep pockets for ip lawyers can afford to even risk it.
Ignoring that was just an example of adapting the source material. There have been many adaptations of Snow White which have not been produced by Disney which have seen 0 legal issues from Disney.
I don't believe that copyright destroys culture, but I definitely believe that it limits it. Increased copyright policing in Japan could have an effect on a lot of dōjin circles, where a lot of derivative artwork occurs. I find dōjin artwork to be quite enjoyable, as it reminds me a lot of the Star War EU or mod communities for some video games that I play.
Culture and sciences have survived and flourished for centuries by doing the exact opposite.
Imagine Einstein or the organization he worked for copywriting and then charging money for every single use.
Money is only one aspect of copyright. Not able to work freely is the real problem which actually kills the culture. Nothing flourished under fear of getting sued.
It's not only what is classically seen as creative work (visual art, music, movies, writing) that would be affected. Any non-physical product is affected: CAD files, chip layouts, code etc.
Honestly, it already happened. Books from before copyright became effectively infinite are widely available. Recent books are widely available. Anything in between (1930-1980) is a gulf of missing books.
I like reading old pulpy science fiction. They are typically out of print, and will never have a reprint. I'll find a reference online, but won't be able to find a copy. There might be a plot summary, or a listing of which out-of-print magazines initially carried the story, but no copies.
As another example (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.
Thanks for this link. It explains what just happened to me last night -- I went to Amazon looking for Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" for an xmas present for my son. It's simply not available anywhere new.
No, because a lot of artists can only earn enough to survive because of copyright law. A new songwriter can only get their royalties because of copyright law, otherwise you can bet the big studios would just lift the songs and record them however they liked.
Copyright is a valuable tool to protect creators, but it does need to be measured properly because in its current form it becomes more about protecting giant international beasts like Disney (who hardly need it with all the new stuff they're producing, surely). The term lengths are ridiculous. I don't really know what they should be, but I'm pretty sure you could make a reasonable stab at it by looking at some statistics about how revenue drops off from works as they age.
Japan extended the copyright term from 50 to 70 years after the author's death[1].
So this change would only help someone pay for rent if you, in this example, had written a book in 1968, had a child at the same time and then promptly died.
That child would now be 50 and somehow hadn't managed to do anything worthwhile with their life to pay their own rent, but had been living on the proceeds of your book published in 1968. Now they'll be able to extend that into their 70s.
And that's in the very best case. This could also be a written in 1918 by someone that was 20, died in 1968, and whose copyright would only now just be expiring.
I suppose book authors could use the same model as musical performers, in that the record company takes the lion's share from the recordings, and the band has to sell live performance tickets and tour merchandise.
You write the book to build the fan-base, and draw your living expenses from signings, convention panels, t-shirts, collector's edition packages, etc. It sounds like a perfectly awful model for promoting the arts, of course.
Perhaps a gallery model? Write just one copy of a book, sell it for thousands of dollars, and let the one that buys it decide whether to unleash it on the world or not. It'd be like that Wu Tang Clan record that Shkreli bought.
Acquire a patron? Allow a rich fan to pay all your living expenses, and in return you put their name in the acknowledgements. Or crowdfund it, and expand the acknowledgements to more pages than the story.
There are a lot of possible models. The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018. There are barely even enough people that value skilled labor enough to pay for it. If art were valued more highly, artists wouldn't even need to figure out how to be paid, because middlemen would be scrambling over each other to skim off some of the cash flowing from audience to artist.
> The underlying problem is that most people just don't value art enough to pay for it in 2018.
In other words, the problem is that "art" is vastly overproduced. Which is only natural when it's being subsidized so heavily via copyright: everyone wants their chance at that rare bestseller which will see them set for life.
Honestly, we need to question not only whether copyright is a reasonable way to promote the production of art, but also whether there is even a need for such promotion in the first place. There is already more artwork in existence than any one person could properly appreciate in their lifetime, and no technical reason why it can't be perfectly preserved and made available to everyone at minimal cost.
If copyright at life+70 years oversupplies the art market, crashing the equilibrium price to nearly zero....
Is the solution too obvious? Cut the term of copyright protection by 5 years every year, then start halving the remaining term after hitting five, until the shovelware "art" becomes trivially manageable. If it still comes in heaping, steaming piles all the way down to one week, then clearly copyright was unnecessary.
This is seriously the worst part of this whole bad news cycle we're on. We need to elect people with strong moral fiber and then hold those elected accountable. There are good people in politics!
It's not just needing to have strong moral fiber, but also be willing to sacrifice whatever other parties in a negotiation offered for you lengthen the copyright period.
In theory, there’s still time to stop it from happening. Although USMCA was signed, it hasn’t been ratified by the US and, due to objections from newly elected Democratic House majority, probably won’t be ratified in its current form. Unfortunately, I don’t think those objections include anything about copyright, so in lieu of some massive public lobbying campaign, any revised version they agree to probably won’t change that part.
On the other hand, there’s a substantial chance that Democrats and Republicans fail to reach a deal on revisions, nothing gets signed, and Trump’s threat to unilaterally terminate NAFTA gets put to the test (both politically and, potentially, in court). I guess we’ll see.
> On the other hand, there’s a substantial chance that Democrats and Republicans fail to reach a deal on revisions
There's zero chance the Democrats and Republicans fail to ratify the new USMCA. Neither party particularly wanted to dump NAFTA in the first place, it was almost entirely a Trump push to renegotiate it. USMCA is very slightly better for the US and North America, so it's better than the deal they all supported before that. It's a small group of Democrats posturing with their new control of the house. They understand the cost of letting the trade pact drop and they have no interest in owning that mistake.
What you say is largely accurate, but it's worth noting that the president's ability to unilaterally terminate NATFA is a subject of debate. [1] [2] The short version is that Trump probably does have the authority to formally withdraw, but doing so without Congress's approval would leave the NAFTA Implementation Act in place, making it into a sort of zombie agreement. Certainly Congress will want to avoid things getting that far, and so the new agreement will probably pass. But as today's news demonstrates, negotiations in the Trump era tend to be... unpredictable.
> Although USMCA was signed, it hasn’t been ratified by the US and, due to objections from newly elected Democratic House majority, probably won’t be ratified in its current form.
The House party structure doesn't apply.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that the President has the “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Ratification is thereby approved or rejected by the Senate.
> As of 2013, the majority of United States free trade agreements were implemented as congressional-executive agreements. Unlike treaties, such agreements require a majority of the House and Senate to pass. Under trade promotion authority (TPA), established by the Trade Act of 1974 and renewed by the Trade Act of 2002, Congress authorizes the President to negotiate "free trade agreements ... if they are approved by both houses in a bill enacted into public law and other statutory conditions are met.
In the case of the USMCA, the Trump administration is seeking approval under "fast-track authority", which he has under the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015. (This authority was originally set to expire in 2018 but was successfully extended to 2021.) [2]
The effect of fast-track authority is that when "implementing legislation" for a trade agreement is considered by Congress, no amendments can be proposed, debate time is limited, and (as a result of time being limited) the bill cannot be filibustered in the Senate. This makes it much easier to pass.
However, the process only applies to legislation, i.e. to the congressional part of congressional-executive agreements. Passing an agreement as a true treaty would still have to follow the normal Constitutional procedure requiring a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which is generally considered more difficult than getting a bare majority of both houses. I'd say that applies even in the current political situation, because the Republicans will only have 53 seats in the Senate; a two-thirds majority is 67 votes, so they would need 14 out of 47 Democrats (30%) to vote yes, assuming all Republicans voted yes. In contrast, in the House the Republicans will have 200 seats, and would require 18 out of 235 Democrats (8%). On the other hand, the House rate would face an opposing majority leader, and the House can also vote to withdraw fast track authority. [3]
In any case, regardless of what the administration could theoretically do, it's currently trying to pass the USMCA as a congressional-executive agreement, which means the change in House party structure certainly is significant.
By the way, even if a true treaty is passed, in theory the House can refuse to provide funds to implement it, which is arguably[4] allowed under the Constitution. But admittedly that's very unlikely to happen unless they really hate the treaty, which wouldn't be the case with the USMCA.
If you already got a copy of a work while it was public domain, does your copy become copyrighted when this happens? What if you made a derivative work while it was still public domain? Are you liable of copyright infringement?
Generally speaking, under common law, laws aren't applied retroactively. Any copy made while it was legal should be fine. You wouldn't be able to make new copies, however.
