[mchusma]

I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?

So many ideas better than the current regime.

[Aromasin]

I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.

Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.

IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

[gwd]

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.

[msabalau]

I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.

The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.

The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.

If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.

And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.

Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.

An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.

[sp0rk]

> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.

Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.

This still seems very reasonable to me.

[glimshe]

So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.

[Pet_Ant]

> Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985

It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.

Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.

[raldi]

If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.

[pydry]

>IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

Im pretty sure that was always the sales pitch and never the intent.

Similar to the Patriot act.

[ssl-3]

14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer than a patent lasts for.

Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?

(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)

[jandrese]

Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.

[BeetleB]

> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).

It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.

[marcosdumay]

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy

IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.

[philipallstar]

> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity

Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.

> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.

In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.

[superxpro12]

14+14 seems to cover these two scenarios? Lifetime+whatever is far too on the other end of this seesaw.

[eesmith]

"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.

Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.

I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.

I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?

The justification for US copyright is "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." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.

What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.

[mcny]

14 years is already too long.

Also, IP is not real. It is a term we should avoid. Copyright and trademark have nothing to do with each other.

[mikkupikku]

It should be the opposite. Independent artists should keep their rights for their natural lives, but if they sell their rights to a corporation the work will fall into public domain a reasonable number of years after that sale.

[bryanrasmussen]

I like it because Peter S. Beagle definitely didn't get screwed over enough in this world, in this other better world he would take it good and proper.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/law/the-last-unicorn-author-pete...

Aside from that your way to help big corporations make sure they could keep their prime pieces of worthwhile IP just is, something else, let's put something in so big corporations can continue screwing people over if they think it is worthwhile, but the people who made something probably won't be able to afford to keep control, unless their last name were Rowling obviously.

finally, as always have to point out that while the argument about the purpose of copyright that is the stand of the U.S is not that which holds in the rest of the world, and as such it seems unlikely to translate to other countries - specifically EU ones - lowering their copyright rules and thus seems unlikely to have any practical effect since Media is an international business nowadays.

[gwbas1c]

I think we should mix in some compulsory licensing: IE, the copyright holder has exclusive rights for a period of time, and then afterwards there is a formula that's used to allow anyone to re-publish.

It will help handle abandonware where the rightsholder can't be bothered to publish something; tries to limit where something is published; or otherwise tries to hold the fee artificially high.

(This could be used, for example, to force a luddite to publish a book in electronic form, force a show that's locked into a single app to print a bluray, ect, ect. A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.)

[mrguyorama]

A reasonable copyright term makes abandonware not a thing

If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.

Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.

>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.

This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.

Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.

[ssl-3]

Let's work through this statutory licensing concept.

A work is published. Sometime later, the entity that created it falls off the face of the earth. The work is thus very much abandoned, and it remains copyrighted anyway.

But tomorrow, that work will enter the timeframe where anyone can pay to license and publish it however they wish. And it just so happens that you wish to license this work and publish it as an ebook because you're feeling trite or something.

Who do you pay? How do you pay them?

[basilikum]

Why on earth would you do that? Why should copyright ever be extended after the fact for already being profitable? That only benefits huge corporations in the same way copyright already does, to the detriment of everyone else.

[gwd]

It's basically a compromise. Many people hate the current situation (90 years for works-for-hire, life + 70 for people), and would love to return it to something like 14+14. But is that realistic? The money behind not doing that is massive, and I think most of the population have been conditioned by forever copyright to a degree that there will never be populist support for it.

But there might be populist support for releasing old stuff that nobody's using. More people would agree, for instance, that it's preposterous that some game from the 80's can't be sold because nobody knows who owns it (but those who think they might own some part of it threaten to sue).

And who knows, once people get used to the idea that copyrights aren't naturally forever, they'll be more amenable to the idea that they should be something more reasonable.

[marcosdumay]

> So many ideas better than the current regime.

Almost every idea is better than the current regime. Maybe even completely cancelling the concept. The same applies to patents, where there's no "maybe", cancelling the concept is clearly better than what we have.

The governments all over the world have been so incredibly corrupt since the 80s, that they managed to confiscate almost every public good in existence.

[nathell]

Which key pieces of IP are worth the exponential fees?

[sd9]

Something like Harry Potter must be worth more than $100M for 14 years, for example.

[whycome]

Why No ip is created in a vacuum. It’s built on the ideas and concepts that came before it. It’s built on the shared open culture that we all own.

[amelius]

Corporations will just turn things into trademarks, like Disney did with Mickey Mouse.

[teddyh]

Nobody who uses the word “copywritten” can be taken seriously.

[throwaway81523]

Good luck with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Enhancement_Act

[mrguyorama]

>exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer

The problem with this concept is that things which are "worth it" to pay absurd fees to maintain long copyrights are the exact things which copyright is meant to revert to the public domain to mix in to future culture.

That's the point.

The idea that richer or more resourced members of a community should have more protections in the law is absurd. If you accidentally created a hit, too bad, you don't get to solely milk it for the rest of your life, and that's a good thing for economies and societies.

Letting you profit immensely for 90 years off a single work or creation is called stagnation and is bad, in the same way that we shouldn't be willing to let someone extend a patent forever just because it was effective.

Copyright ought to be for the little guy. The little guy should never have the resources to extend it past a short time frame. A little guy creative who is satisfied with milking the same thing for 30 years is, frankly, not a creative or artist and copyright is not intended to protect them.

Copyright is so you can live off the proceeds for a short while to spend time creating your next work. Copyright is not so you can profit for multiple generations off your work.

A reminder that any sort of inheritance of value or resources at all is inherently anti-meritocratic.

[testdelacc1]

I like this system but it will make the rich richer. Disney will never have a problem paying the $100k or even $10M from something that is generating revenue. But the heirs of a mildly successful author won’t be able to, leaving those works to be harvested for free by Disney et al.

The current system, for all its faults, gives rich and poor the same benefits.

Keeping The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien (published 1954) would have forced the Tolkien estate to pay $100k in 1982 on minimal revenues. Then $10M in 1996 in the hope that they would recoup it in a future film licensing agreement. Except no one would pay $10M+ to license it when they could just wait until 2010 to pay $0 and make it without any conditions being stipulated by the Tolkien estate.

So the Tolkien Estate would have let copyright lapse in 1996 and the eventual adaption would have grossed $900 million, of which they’d have seen $0. Followed by 2 more adaptations that grossed $1 billion each.

Edit: downvote if you want, but nothing I’ve said is inaccurate or incorrect.

[martiuk]

The idea of an exponential fee is a good one, in what universe does a _single_ Disney IP become worth over $1T?