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Craptacular! posted:And that's not an illegitimate position, I see the value in it. I'm just saying I'm a corporate whore that would side with big business if it were put to a vote. And that's really more about the length of time than any cheats or extensions, those are poo poo. But why though. I’m really struggling to see the reasoning. If Harry Potter only had a 30 year IP protection, does anyone think JK Rowling wouldn’t have written the books? If anyone today could publish their own Star Wars stories and comic books, George Lucas would still be rich and we’d all have cool Star Wars stories freely exploring and subverting the existing tropes. I really struggle to see understand the justifications for those super long restrictions. They make everyone worse off for the benefit of a few large corporations and millionaires.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:20
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evilweasel posted:You have IP rights in your personal likeness though it's been a long enough time that I don't recall the exact contours of those IP rights (and if they're statutory or common-law). Plus using CGI to make photorealistic pornographic images/videos of people who didn't agree to it is all sorts of other torts. Uh I remember when they used Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cgi likeness in Terminator: Salvation he wasn’t entitled to any royalties because Warner Bros already owned the right to his image from the first Terminator. So if Warner Bros wants to make a terminator themed sex cgi model I’m not sure there’s anything Arnold could do to stop them.
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Dec 11, 2018 22:29
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evilweasel posted:An author who has a good but not international blockbuster instant billionaire book may rely on that income for the rest of their life. JK Rowling isn't gonna be in the poorhouse if she loses her copyright tomorrow, but I can easily see it mattering to many artists. I can see it mattering to a very small number of artists like Steven King, but crucially I can't see it acting as a real incentive for creators that will actually effect their creative output. This is because 99% of IP probably won't produce hardly any returns after just a few years. So just talking about novels for a moment, I would expect the distribution of total revenue per book to follow a logistic distribution. That is to say most produce extremely little revenue, while a very small number produce huge returns. Revenue per unit of time for each book probably follows a negative logistic curve, with most books producing the vast majority of sales shortly after publishing and rapidly declining to negligible rates after a few years. The exceptions are very few, and the equivalent of winning the authorial lottery. Something like the book To Kill a Mockingbird that continues to sell copies year after year. There's probably only a few hundred novels like this out of millions. Authors are very well aware of the improbability of their work achieving the level of success of Harper Lee and JK Rowling, therefore their decisions as creators are predicated on much more realistic assumptions. What motivates them are fat advances, which are money in the bank, and the prospect of selling a few thousand or million copies over the next decade To still be selling thousands of copies of a book 50+ years in the future is so improbable a scenario and so little relevant to their immediate life I can't see how it could possibly influence creator behavior. Its impossible to plan for that kind of success because its impossible to predict. I'm not sure of the exact time scales involved, but after a certain point which is much shorter than a human life I think the total social value of copyright protections drops to zero. In the short term it encourages creative production because it guarantees authors a right to profit from their work. The additional incentive value for each additional unit of time allotted to the IP monopoly is going to rapidly decrease. Certainly I doubt Walt Disney would have changed his behavior had his mouse gone out of copyright a decade ago, we have gained no social value from continuing to enforce a Disney IP claim to that idea.
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Dec 11, 2018 23:01
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Easy Diff posted:I've been reading/following this thread pretty closely, since my mother happens to be a NYT-bestselling author with a pretty substantial (30+ novels) library that my sister and I stand to inherit when she passes (she's in her 70s now). Monetizing it post-death will be basically adding an additional six-figure income to each of our households, and copyright is the only reason that windfall exists. Another problem with setting a copyright terminus at the death of the author is it creates one hell of a perverse incentive for publishers to kill the author. Not really something you want to encourage. Honestly with the goal of optimizing social gain I can't think of any reason to take the life of the author into account. 30-50 years from the date of creation or registration is plenty of time to incentivize the creation of creative works. On the subject of inheritance, is IP valued like any other property for the purposes of estate taxes? Of course the current limit in the United States is so absurdly high I don't think it would be relevant to your situation Easy Diff, but still, I wonder. Assuming your mother's IP produced $200,000 a year in income for 20 years, it would be equivalent in value to about six million dollars in 20 year treasury bonds. Split two ways I don't think that would have any estate tax, but theoretically if the limit were lower, I'd hope it would be taxed like any other property.
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Dec 12, 2018 17:34
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Easy Diff posted:Wouldn't it be the reverse? With the authors death, all the IP would be freely distributable, by anyone? So the publishing house would force families to extend end of life care as long as possible? yeah actually I guess so, here I was stuck thinking in the dead paradigm of the pre-digital file sharing era, when you actually had to buy physical books made of paper to read a novel. Shows how much I know about publishing.
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Dec 12, 2018 17:47
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General Dog posted:How does society stand to benefit from entertainment entering the public domain? If you want to read Moby Dick you can go to a website that has the full text available for free and just start reading immediately. In contrast if you want to read the Great Gatsby you either have to pay for it, commit a crime, or find a library. Further restrictions on the use of the characters and story limit the ability of modern artists to create new art inspired by the copyright material and add additional costs to projects in the form of fees to the copyright owner. The argument is that the additional costs of consuming the copyrighted material and constraints on creating new art are necessary to encourage creators to produce. I doubt F Scott Fitzgerald was particularly motivated by the prospect of Scribner earning rents in his works for over three decades after the death of his son however. A copyright that does not incentivize creative production serves no purpose and should become public domain.
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Dec 14, 2018 18:11
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