This gross generalization of other people's views on important issues is really offensive.
My view is that the Copyright Act of 1976 had it about right when they established the duration of copyright. My view is that members of Congress were handsomely rewarded by a specific corporation to carve out special exceptions to this law because they wanted larger profits. "We" didn't call the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 the "Mickey Mouse Act" for nothing. It's also no coincidence that Disney is now the largest media company in the world.
Reducing copyright term extension has everything to do with restoring competition and creativity to our economy, and reversing corruption that borders on white collar crime. It has nothing to do with AI. Don't recruit me into some bullshit argument that rewrites history and entrenches Disney's ill-gotten monopoly.
Companies that can leverage this new wave of AI will have, in reality, 1000x the advantage that you believe Disney has.
There's this little thing called brand value. Disney has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Forbes estimated it at being worth about $60 billion as I recall.
That brand was built heavily over many decades on IP that dates back to the 1920s, such as the most recognizable Disney character, Mickey Mouse. They manipulated the law to enhance the value of that IP and thereby gained an edge over their competitors. That's a big part of why they now enjoy such a dominant position.
None of this is especially controversial (you will get a very different spin from Disney of course).
If you want to comment about how business works you should read history and learn how business works first. AI luminary that you are, if you choose to remain ignorant then I guess this whole cycle will happen again with AI.
There is a massive amount of amazing stories based on ancient myths because it's one of the few large corpora that isn't copywritten. Once you see it in media you can't unsee it. The only space where that kind of creativity can thrive anymore is fan-fiction which lives in weird limbo where it's illegal but the copyright owners don't care. And when you want to bring any of it to the mainstream you have to hide it, all of Ali Hazelwoods books are reworked fanfics because she can't use the actual characters that inspired her -- her most famous book "The Love Hypothesis" is a Reylo fic.
Go check out https://archiveofourown.org/media and see how many works are owned by a few large corporations.
It has felt on HN and elsewhere that the prevailing attitude to copyright has been these two, somewhat contradictory, things. That's what I was trying to highlight with my phrasing of "we", which was also not meant to include myself but be a nod to the way a vocal group try to steer and dominate the conversion.
Both debates are important to have, I don't know the answers.
You don't think it's them being allowed to buy Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm? Is creativity ruined because I can't make a Mickey Mouse cartoon or t-shirt? Does the world need Luke Skywalker coming from any individual studio?
People are free to make the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, etc. and there's nothing out there that stops them.
I've got no love for giant corporations but I see it a lot less about copyright than massive corporation gobbling up more corporations. There's no shortage of creativity out there if you look for it.
Can you explain your line of thinking here? How does the ability to use another company’s intellectual property restore creativity? It just seems like a path to allow bootlegging.
The long timelines stifle new creative works by keeping other, especially smaller, outfits having to make sure they don't accidentally run afoul of another copyright from decades ago. This needs capital to either be proactive in searching or to defend a suit that's brought.
Here's a recent article about the battle between the copyright holders of Let's Get It On and Ed Sheeran for Thinking Out Loud. Those two songs are separated by around 40 years. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/07/ed-sheeran-cop...
To me it is pretty much the same thing - not a fan of nepo-kids living off of trust funds they didn't earn - but if you are going to fix one problem, you should try to fix all of the almost identical ones at the same time and not get upset that disney is still making money off of something they created 100 years ago, and not be upset about kennedy's, rockefellers, and the like still living of the money their great-greats generated a hundred years ago.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be undervaluing those old school Disney characters, yes now Disney is huge and has a much larger portfolio of IP, but in 1998 they were a far bigger percentage of Disney's portfolio than they are now.
You're not wrong that consolidation is a problem. My point is that Congress changed the law in a way that helped Disney and at least partially enabled that consolidation. (In fact, it's fairly rare to come across a monopoly or any heavily entrenched corporation that isn't enabled in some way by government collusion.)
If you shoot someone, take all his money, then build a business with it, you're still a murderer. (Just now you're a rich murderer.)
Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Do I feel I should have control over what I create? I make hammers for a living. I sell them for $10. I don't expect any control over what people do with "my" hammers once I sell them. I don't even expect to stop my neighbor from buying one, teaching herself to build hammers, and then manufacturing and selling identical ones for $9. Do you?
(To anticipate the rest of this tired conversation, the temporary monopoly tradeoff ("securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries") is facially reasonable. But it's important to recognize that the "shouldn't" and "feel" in your questions are based on a very recent recharacterization of these temporary monopolies as "intellectual property," which is probably the most financially successful propaganda term ever devised. Start with "temporary monopoly" instead, and then the better rhetorical question for you to be asking is "when should Disney's temporary monopoly end?")
We should accept that people can get offended by anything and, because of this, just demote the concept.
If let's say Star Wars falls out of copyright tomorrow, economically that has two effects. One, Disney loses a ton of future revenue. Two, countless Disney other people create derivatives of Star Wars, and they make money from those. Competition is increased.
So the expiration of a copyright results in a sharing of the wealth. The wealth generating potential along with the creative potential is passed along to all members of society. Our culture becomes richer and deeper. A great example of this is all the works that build on the mythos created by HP Lovecraft, one of the last great ones created before Congress started indefinitely extending copyright. Lovecraft wrote great literature and some of the authors that built on his world are fantastic as well, I'm sure they've come up with countless ideas he never considered. But as long as Congress keeps on extending copyright, nothing we create today will ever become like that.
There is of course an important question about what is fair and how long a copyright should last. Most people these days agree that it should last for at least the author's lifetime, maybe long enough to benefit their kids and grandkids as well. But the status quo is basically permanent copyright which prevents substantial creative and economic benefits to society.
Copyright has been the most powerful tool in any media company's toolbox when it comes to consolidating power and IP and rolling into a larger and larger ball of what we call culture.
The #1 issue with copyright today in my opinion is that if we keep on extending it forever, it will forever entrench the wealth and power of a small number of companies that hold the largest portfolios of IP. I think this is also a huge issue for AI, maybe the biggest issue, because at the end of the day an AI is really just another copyrighted work. It is not the anthropomorphized thing that countless people are acting like it is, it's a work. Change copyright and you change the nature of future AI works.
With long copyright terms, it encourages copyright holders to milk a single work for the length of the copyright (90+ years) and therefore discourages the creation of something new. It also encourages people to obtain copyrights to leverage them for profit, rather than making anything at all. A child of an artist can spend their entire life supported by their parent's copyright, and never has to make anything unique for as long as they live.
How is any of this good for creativity?
The people who work for the company collect rent on things they didn't make.
Normal property ownership is something we use to manage scarcity that already exists—that there is only one of something, and we have to decide where it will go and who will be able to decide how it is used. Intellectual property, by contrast, creates artificial scarcity by means of a government-enforced monopoly (in the case of copyright, the monopoly is on the right to produce a copy of a work).
It is unfortunate (and perhaps not accidental) that we settled on the term "intellectual property" as opposed to something more descriptive like "intellectual monopoly." "Intellectual property" encourages equivocating such monopolies with normal property, a mistake that tends to muddle debates on the subject.
So that is still something possible to do in roughly 20 years.
Here's one key bit from the OP: - - - - -
But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part:
There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.
In the aftermath of this, Sheeran has said that he’s now filming all of his recent songwriting sessions, just in case he needs to provide evidence that he and his songwriting partners came up with a song on their own, which is depressing in its own right.
Right? There were even competitors back then. People all but forgot the Looney Tunes.
IMO I would rather a structure that:
- Guarantees creators (and their descendants) some number of years of financial benefit / veto (30 seems fine!) - i.e. pay me what I want or you can't use this creative work.
- Separately grant creators the ability to veto "official" projects that use their creative output in their lifetimes.
IMO, it seems like there's a productive "middle ground" between total control and anything goes. After the 30 year benefit expired, you couldn't sue for damages - just costs & to stop use.
Information wants you to stop anthropomorphizing it.
The "we" that has been calling for shorter terms is no more a gross generalization than the "we" that is calling for more protection against AI use of stuff.
The world outside of HN-and-similar has been much less anti-copyright than the world in here. More "neutral" seems to be dominant - we're not extending it anymore; we're not shrinking it either. And currently generally more panicked about AI taking away their jobs and rendering their skills and creativity useless.
The original post was a very fair summary of how there are now two ground-level movements competing that there weren't two years ago.
But we have selected an economic system that depends on ownership to drive exchange in a market, so... that's why.
The nature of information is to dissolve into entropy.
Specifically all forms of intellectual property in the USA trace back to Article I Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Which gives Congress the power, "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".
Three, the derivatives are made and Disney starts marketing "Disney's Star Wars" which continue to be the high-demand (and high-value) versions. The situation is unchanged.
For example, you can currently buy The Little Mermaid in non-Disney form[1], but Disney's version is what most people want.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=little+mermaid+Hans+Christian+And...
That's the same thing.
No one can use my stuff..........(unless you pay me royalties).
It absolutely is.
Doing it at all requires time & attentive focus, which is a finite resource for anybody mortal, and moreover a resource that's scarce and has to be spent in multiple places.
Doing it well requires significant investment in practice and training, often years of it, maybe even decades in order to develop certain levels of expressive fluency.
As with any issue of scarcity, economics comes in. If you want this activity supported, one good way of doing it is enabling the investment of time. Copyright does this by giving people an economic/legal claim on how copies of their work are distributed.
Paying for copies has the usual market merits -- the economic reward and signals of value are proportional to copies acquired. There are other ways of course, common ones brought up here are patronage and merchandising, but they lose the market merits, and both are basically another way of saying "nobody should have to pay for the value in your work directly," and merchandising is even worse in that it's basically saying "yeah, you'll just need another job to support yourself while you're doing this thing", which is time taken away from investment in the creative endeavor, so you'll get less of the actual endeavor.
The trouble with IP is that there are lots of influential people that very much would like IP to be useful in creating welfare. Unfortunately the evidence for that is surprisingly scarce. For discussion, see e.g. Boldrin & Levine
You can certainly pay the rights holder to use their property! Still! You could do it even without copyright I suppose. However, I think a space where it costs time and money for the rights holder to try to stop use and they won't get paid for it is super useful.
Consider this in the case of software as well - you get ~30 years of benefit from your work, but you can refuse to allow companies to incorporate it into their products as long as you live. Whichever companies you want! You can also not do that.
Expression has no value in today's digital world.
Creation has value but using expression to exchange for that value is difficult, requiring limits on expression in order for the system to work.
it shouldn't. Or, well, it should, but it should be the one and only thing taxed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The ownership, with heavy taxes on that ownership, pushes towards making sure people benefit from the land.
IP law reasonably does. See: https://trademarks.justia.com/852/28/the-little-mermaid-8522...
Technically life + 70 years - or 1 million years for that matter - is "limited" - but I imagine 14+14 is probably closer to what they had in mind.
"goods are scarce because there are not enough resources to produce all the goods that people want to consume".(quoted at [1])
Physical books are intrinsically scarce because they require physical resources to make and distribute copies. Libraries are often limited by physical shelf space.
Ebooks are not intrinsically scarce because there are enough resources to enable anyone on the internet to download any one of millions of ebooks at close to zero marginal cost, with minimal physical space requirements per book. Archive.org and Z-Library are examples of this.
Consider also free goods:
"Examples of free goods are ideas and works that are reproducible at zero cost, or almost zero cost. For example, if someone invents a new device, many people could copy this invention, with no danger of this "resource" running out."[2]
i.e. enforce egregious IP violations while criminalizing trolls.
For extremely loose values of "we", perhaps - I didn't select it, and I would vote "no" if the idea were proposed...
It's pretty mysterious that you think you need to introduce this to the conversation at this point given how prominently scarcity dynamics figure into the comment you're replying to.
> Physical books are intrinsically scarce
Once their production was industrialized with printing press tech, copies of books weren't scarce, they were actually revolutionarily cheap.
The copyright bargain isn't borne out of ignorance of how changes in that direction affect the overall dynamic, it's borne out of deep understanding of what remains scarce and risky and difficult to compensate for when the marginal cost of producing copies drops drastically, and what kind of claims might help.
Authorship may be scarce - costly and resource intensive (LLMs notwithstanding) as you describe, while copying and distribution of intangible goods like ideas or digital media is essentially free and unlimited, as I suspect PP was trying to say.
As you correctly note, the constitutional copyright bargain permits a limited time monopoly in return for (hopefully) advancing "the progress of science and the useful arts."
"which people in particular are benefitting the most" seems to be the perennial question.
Of course in reallity things are usually more complex and wer are talking about two different opinions A and B that aren't even inherently incompatibly but just some motivations for A would lead to ¬B and vice versa.
But un this particular case I think the flaw is in your assumption that the majority wants stricter copyright law for AI rather than wants the same copyright law that humans are beholden to to also apply to AI, wether that law is the current may-as-well-be-perpetual-monopoly or 0 copyright or anything in between.
"Property is theft" is not a new idea, makes a lot of sense. Unless you have a lot of it, and then those [censored] can [censored] right off.
Copyright that doesn't expire would make "a whole lot of cents".
(I agree with you but, the ownership is the corrupting factor.)