Copyrights should have never been extended longer than 5 years in the first place, either remove draconian copyright laws or outlaw LLM style models using copyrighted material, corpos can’t have both.
Bro, what? Some books take more than 5 years to write and you want their authors to only have authorship of it for 5 years? Wtf. I have published books that are a dozen years old and I’m in my mid-30s. This is an insane take.
The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span–it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we’d be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.
5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.
Exactly! That’s what we had originally in the US, and I thought that was more than fair. I would add that the renewal should only be awarded if they can prove they need more time to recoup R&D costs and it’s still available commercially.
So yeah, something in the neighborhood of 10-15 years w/ a renewal sounds totally fair to me. Let them keep the trademarks and whatnot as long as they’re in use (e.g. you shouldn’t be able to make a new entry in a series w/o the author’s permission for the marks, but fanfic that explicitly mentions it’s not original/canon would probably fall under fair use), but the actual copyright should expire very quickly.
You don’t have to stop selling when a book becomes public domain, publishers and authors sell public domain/commons books frequently, it’s just you won’t have a monopoly on the contents after the copyright expires.
how about: tiered copy rights?
after 5 years, you lose some copyright but not all?
it’s a tricky one but impoverished people should still be able to access culture…
And how do you think that’s going to go when suddenly the creator needs to compete with massive corps?
The reason copyright exists is for the same reason patents do: to protect the little guy.
Just because corporations abuse it doesn’t mean we throw it out.
It shouldn’t be long, but it sure should be longer than 5 years.
Or maybe 5 years unless it’s an individual.
Edit - think logically. You think the corps are winning now with the current state of copyright? They won’t NEED to own everything without copyright and patent laws. They’ll just be able to make profit off your work without passing any of it to the creator.
Thanks that’s very insightful and I’ll amend my position to 15 years 5 may be just a little zealous. 100 year US copyrights have been choking innovation due to things like Disney led trade group lobbyists, 15 years would be a huge boost to many creators being able to leverage more IPs and advancements being held in limbo unused or poorly used by corpo entities.
I think copyright lasting 20 years or so is not unreasonable in our current society. I’d obviously love to live in a society where we could get away with lower. As a compromise, I’d like to see compulsory licensing applied to all written work. (E.g., after n years, anyone can use it if they pay royalties and you can’t stop them; the amount of royalties gradually decreases until it’s in the public domain.)
I agree that copyright is far too long, but at 5 years there’s hardly incentive to produce. You could write a novel and have it only starting to get popular after 5 years.
You don’t have to stop selling when it becomes public domain, people sell books, movies, music, etc that are all in the public domain and people choose it over free versions all the time because of convenience, patroning arts, etc.
Hard to compete with the megacorp that publishes all books on a 5 year delay and rebrands it as their own, because there’s no rules with public domain.
So these companies are against what you call draconian, but you also disagree with these companies? Everyone here is so fucking short sighted, it’s insane to me.
The fact that you can’t distinguish between being against something vs. being against a double-standard is insane to me.
the issue is that foreign companies aren’t subject to US copyright law, so if we hobble US AI companies, our country loses the AI war
I get that AI seems unfair, but there isn’t really a way to prevent AI scraping (domestic and foreign) aside from removing all public content on the internet
