Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing.
No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.
Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this.
Until it changes, pirate everything.
The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years.
Expect something similar when the next big author dies; my prediction: JK Rowling.
Notes:
0 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/505
1- https://hughstephensblog.net/2023/12/18/winnie-the-poohs-cop...
Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity.
Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.
JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard; but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption amount means that few estates pay any tax.
> Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party.
A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of an untimely death.
We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something.
It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention.
Although the US was not a signatory until 1989.
The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so.
This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose.
This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.
I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.
* You declare your property’s worth.
* You pay IP taxes on that worth.
* You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves.
And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M.
Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police.
People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case.
The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case.
But they don’t?
Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding.
Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes.
Often the property is never found and returned.
We all get legal protections for our property.
If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.
It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.
A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property.
This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210
capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally. These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society.
In some countries taxes are annual.
In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year.
However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.
In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..
(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)
It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not.
5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us.
Fuck the copyright cartels.
There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined.
Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal.
These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve?
What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?)
Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok.
Next paragraph: "Mondrian died in 1944. Any of his works subject to a life-plus-70 regime would have entered the public domain" 10 years ago. Who even thought of including that in a legal argument??
There's all sorts of quirks for anything published before that rule got standardised more-or-less worldwide, but in general 1930-1945 is still like a legal grey area that can be challenged in court and you should be good to go for anything published before that. And don't get me even started on posthumous publications, that's a whole different can of worms where a family member might claim some contribution (like for example Anne Frank's father), pushing the copyright further to the life of the author + life of that family member + 70.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...:
“For works published or registered before 1978, the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed during the 28th year following publication. Copyright renewal has been automatic since the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992.
For works created before 1978, but not published or registered before 1978, the standard §302 copyright duration of 70 years from the author's death also applies. Prior to 1978, works had to be published or registered to receive copyright protection. Upon the effective date of the 1976 Copyright Act (which was January 1, 1978) this requirement was removed and these unpublished, unregistered works received protection. However, Congress intended to provide an incentive for these authors to publish their unpublished works. To provide that incentive, these works, if published before 2003, would not have their protection expire before 2048.”
There is also this version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260301183248/https://copyright...
(Origin site is presently down.)
How does paying money to Mondrian's great great great great grandchildren enhance society?
Mondrian died decades ago. He is not creating any more. Copyright of his works is not serving us any more.
Copyright should have ended when the balance between encouraging his creation and encouraging others to create based on his works was reached. i.e. About 5 years after he made the piece.
Fuck the copyright parasites whining about this.
> 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
One could argue that a colored box promotes neither science nor useful arts, and therefore applying any copyright protection at all to this non-useful art is unconstitutional.