No Stupid Questions

Bigtech would hire hitmen to go after PhD students

It should return to the original design: 14 years from creation, and then 14 more years if requested and paid for.

Should be X years after publication, lifespan should not matter.

A person at age 200 (I mean in the future when they find anti-aging tech) should not be able to gatekeep the stuff they wrote when they were 25.

A person publishing a book at age 30 then dies next day in a car accident should not lose the right to pass on profits made from the book to his/her children.

Copyright should be fixed-length, fuck lifelong copyright, fuck "corporate personhood".

Could be incentive to murder content creators.

It should be held by government and every company that makes money out of copyrighted material should pay it in taxes and authors should get money from government as long as they live. It can be steam % so 70% author 30% government. When author dies government gets 50% children gets 50% after that grand children 30% and then back to 0%.

This way each country would benefit from their brightest minds now it's just foreign corporations benefit from everything.

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

Research by mathematician Rufus Pollock in 2009 pegged optimal copyright length at 15 years, regardless of time of authorial death. So if I copyrighted something at 30, I would lose the copyright automatically at 45, even if I lived to 90.

Plot: a rival publisher hires a killer to murder a successful author over the copyright.

Well, we need to figure out how to kill companies first. They own the copyright in the situations you would care about.

So, it kind of already works that way. If the company dies, no one is gonna come after you. Unless it was sold of to another company, that is.

I'm all in favor of shortening copyright length, but it shouldn't be tied to a creator's lifespan. It's too variable, and it doesn't make sense for anything that more than one person worked on.

I think a reasonable compromise would be 20 years default, after which point you could apply for a 5 year extension twice. Extensions will only be granted if the work is still being made accessible, either new physical copies are being printed or digital distribution is available.

But I would also include a clause that if a work is no longer accessible, such as being pulled from streaming services, an online game being shut down, software not updated to be compatible with modern platforms, etc, copyright is considered to be in a weaker state where end users are permitted to pirate it for noncommercial purposes.

That's how it used to be. It only became a problem when it stopped being an individual who owned rhe copyright and instead was owned by a corporation.

Now corporations are treated as people, so this change would only make it worse for the little guys.

Limit copyright to 5 years.

Abolish patents entirely.

Greed and selfishness are unacceptable foundations for any society.

I am in favour of that.

That is the BARE MINIMUM of reason.

There's no reason IN THE WORLD for any kind of idea of "intellectual property" to exist once the creator is dead.

NONE.

It doesn't benefit the creator in any way to have such a system where people can claim ownership of another's work after death. All that does is deny the living things that could help them in favor of some ridiculous notion that you're helping the dead; it's asinine.

Headline from the past: Sadly, our beloved Walt Disney died yesterday after apparent suicide by 20 knife stabs to the back.

Bad. Copyright needs to be reformed, but this would be more likely to put money into the hands of rich people and corporations.

Imagine that I've just released a book series that's more popular than Harry Potter and LOTR combined, and I get hit by a bus. What's then stopping Disney or Warner Brothers etc from producing a set of movies with all the associated merch, and making a shit load of money, with not a penny going to my family? Not even giving them the opportunity to make enough to live on, never mind getting rich?

In that situation, depending on the contract, the publisher could even pulp the existing books and release identical copies without paying me or my family.

As with all economics, the answer is probably complicated. Death incentives aren't great. Brands partially have value because they can be kept consistent, and some iconic characters have kept a relatively consistent identity across multiple authors. Allowing a free-for-all too early might make those kinds of characters harder to develop?

My favorite variation on this (which probably also has complicated consequences) is that government should, after say ~10 years, get the chance to buy any particular copyright/patent for a sum (based on its profitability, say), and should they choose to buy then the work enters the public domain early. No idea what horrors this hides.

I think it's a great idea. Their descendants can inherit any proceeds from their life, rather than the ownership of the copyright.

Define "death".

For a book? There is very much an argument that the listed author would make sense. But... good authors tend to have ten or twenty solid pages of thanking their editors and beta readers and researchers and partners and so forth for very good reason. And while they tend to not get royalties (outside of the partner), those associated with the publisher sort of do in the sense of getting a continued paycheck in part because of their demonstrated "value".

But let's bump that up to a movie. Is the screenwriter the creator? What about a case where there were multiple "script doctors" brought in to punch up a premise? The director? The lead actor? The ridiculously good performance by the supporting actress that held every scene together? The people in the editing bay who turned "I want this scene to pop more" into actionable edits? The VFX team who did the entirety of every action sequence and half the dialogue because the costumes weren't finalized until a week before it hit theatres?

And so forth. The time where works tended to have a singular creator was... closer to millennia ago than not. Even a lot of the "Willy Shakespeare was a fraud" is rooted in a misunderstanding of what editing and collaboration is.

I don't know what a good model is. I like the concept of a fixed period with the idea that if you are continuing to use an IP then people will pay for the new stuff. Then I look at all the cash-in horror slop because Winnie the Pooh became public domain and... does that help ANYBODY?

My mind keeps coming back to the end of Sebastien de Castell's Spellslinger series. He left a LOT of loose ends (in part because of the themes of the story he was telling which would be spoilers to elaborate on) but did a quick epilogue sequence of two characters reuniting. And then he wrote an afterward where he talked about how (paraphrasing) that is just one possible ending and that it doesn't actually matter what he wrote because, after the years we all spent reading about Kellen and Reichis and Ferius and Nephenia and Shalla... they aren't just his characters. They are OUR characters too. And what he can see as a potential future isn't necessarily what we see. I forget if he explicitly said writing fanfiction was a good idea but... that is kind of the reality of it.

And in that sense? I increasingly come down on: Let the companies and creators keep their IPs. Only they get to profit. But also heavily strengthen fair use so long as there is no direct profit (we do need to understand the idea of ad revenue for a youtube channel or a website or something). Fill up AO3 with ALL the good slop but keep it out of theatres unless they are gonna file the mormon off and Fifty Shades of Grey it. Beyond that? Whatever.

And just for those wondering what those themes were: