Voters need to make it clear that it does benefit the lawmaking class. Votes are more powerful than money in politics - but only if you use them. If you fall for one party is all good you have lost power.

The hard part is getting enough other voters to care. If it is just you money is more important. If it is you and many others though you beat money.

Big acts grossing colossal figures can continue that for a longer time. But the growth of the fee is exponential, while sales never grow exponentially for indefinite time. I can agree that the base of 2 may be too low; let's take 4 instead.

Let's assume that Dreamworks are so good that they get $500M a year for a particular IP. For 10 years they enjoy free coverage.

But even if on year 25 of coverage they would still have been making some money on the franchise, next year they go badly into the red.

The code:

  def fee(y): 
    return 0 if y <= 10 else 10 * 4 ** (y - 11)

  def total_fee(y): 
    return sum(fee(yy) for yy in range(1, y + 1))

  def total_revenue(years, yearly_revenue=500_000_000): 
    return yearly_revenue * years

  def balance(y):
    f = total_fee(y) / 1_000_000
    r = total_revenue(y) / 1_000_000
    return "%2d %8.1fM %8.1fM %6.1fM" % (y, f, r, r - f)

  for y in range(21, 27):
    print(balance(y))

  21     14.0M  10500.0M 10486.0M
  22     55.9M  11000.0M 10944.1M
  23    223.7M  11500.0M 11276.3M
  24    894.8M  12000.0M 11105.2M
  25   3579.1M  12500.0M 8920.9M
  26  14316.6M  13000.0M -1316.6M

And this is for a mega-popular franchise, that makes half a billion every year in a row for more than two decades. It's a very rare hit, comparable to Star Wars maybe, or the Mickey Mouse. Most IPs don't stay so staunchly popular for this long.

You can try playing with the parameters and check outcomes for different revenue shapes and fee bases.

It's not backward. It means that wealthy IP owners pay more tax to society for the privilege of earning more!

OK, person A invented something, patented it, and sits on it for 20 years, unable to find an useful application.

Person B invents the same thing, and immediately sees a way to make it a big hit, with lots of demand. Should person A be blocking person B for 20 years? Why do you think person A should be entitled to that? What do you think would be more beneficial for the society?

Patents were invented for a good reason. They prevent important inventions from dying as trade secrets, and being lost to the society.

A patent requires a clear explanation of an invention, in exchange for a limited time of monopoly on its use. After that, the invention enters public domain.

Before patents. important inventions would stay tightly guarded secrets, because once the invention leaks, there's no recourse, every competitor can freely use it, and put you out of business. Hence the inventions were lost forever (at best, need to be reinvented from scratch) if the original inventor went out of business somehow without sharing the secret.

Patents are a boon for everyone as long as the detrimental effects from the monopoly don't outweigh the beneficial effects of sharing knowledge and general ease of business operation without thick shrouds of secrecy. That is, as long as the time of protection is set right.

Being able to play old video games for free is not the point though, it's just a nice side effect of an intellectual property regime with a reasonable duration, say something less than 150 years.

the people who want to play old videogames for free

With the people that understand that reality isn’t as black and white as you make it out to be and that will hopefully find better compromises going forward.

Show me an actual person whose livelihood or retirement depends on their copyright (and not, say, owning somebody else's copyright). I'm not convinced that the current state of copyright law actually benefits authors and artists.

There are no residuals for game devs. It's work for hire, so holding on to this idea that they will get paid money for every sale (even after it's no longer sold - but maybe somehow once these assholes "resurrect" a game they never bothered to bring back after 30 years, will somehow benefit the actual people who made it is a joke). This has nothing to do "their livelihood and retirement"It's about protecting corporate profits in the very slim case they may discover that bringing something back (ha sure) will benefit the corporation that OWNS the rights.

IP isn't the same across the board it's not like game devs are singers who have ASCAP/BMI etc protections. Game devs are code jockeys who get shit on by the corporations with NO rights to the actual work THEY produced. Why do you act like this is the same as music with perpetual rights to the actual creators? It rarely if ever is.

You can go ahead and "blame" the workers you claim to support for failing to "put that in their employment contract, it is a "free market" for labor, after all" or you can work on changing the system to at least let the past be free and open and history have a chance of being important or just let it all be locked in a vault, in disuse in the "hope" that maybe someday a corporation will "release" it again as a game. Or you can let people who ARE passionate about it work on it and let the public have the right to it.

As the parent comments point out, the LITERAL REASON OF COPYRIGHT IN THE US CONSTITUTION is to benefit the public. It has nothing to do with giant corps getting rich as fuck off other people's labor. Contract law gets in the way and lets these pricks steal the work and wealth, deny people the rights and only THEY get the benefit, this is the precise opposite of the public benefit intended.

Culture happens on faster and faster cycles than ever before, yet instead of admitting the speed of it, these behemoths who own IP, demand continual extensions (well until the most recent time when Disney finally relented and let Steamboat Willy enter the Public Domain recently).

Instead of promoting "innovation" (as phrased in the US Constitution), it promotes lethargy slouch and continued re-use of the same things. It's the exact opposite of the intent. And no, this bullshit about "livelihoods and retirement" mean jackshit in game dev. You shit your game out, you got paid for that work, and that's it. All the excess profits go to the corp, not the actual devs. IP in this case is not about humans owning/making, and it's corporations through and through, and unless you held onto the same corporation for 40 years, as the creator, it's not going to be you getting the supposed benefit of this.

Yep. It needs to be restored or even shortened beyond the original window.

IIRC, early copyright (say, during Mozart's time) required royalties to only be paid out for the first performance of a work.

And that is why some of these composers were so prolific - to keep up their payday, they had to crank out music instead of collecting on royalties of performances they were directly involved with.

Unthinkable today, really.

Nope, guess not

I think it's the other way around. Patents are hard work, often you make a physical product and you get a measly 20 years. Meanwhile, copyrighted material flows out of my ass and gets 70+ years. Ridiculous. Why bother making anything?

I think this is accidentally a bit misleading. You _could_ write a story similar to Harry Potter without infringing copyright, but it isn’t just the name “harry potter” or some other substring that’s protected. There is a degree of similarity after which you’d be guilty of copyright infringement. I don’t know how that criteria is decided though.

How about both? You are welcome to critique my opinion.

As for assumption 3, there's SpaceX. They don't open their design of their rockets to the public where their competitors, such as the Chinese can copy them. Neither the US government nor SpaceX wants that. So there's a large amount of innovations, probably countless designs that went into these rockets. Maybe in a better geopolitical situation, patents would be respected, but why would SpaceX gives everyone the blueprint to catch up? Patents make more sense if designs are easily reverse engineered and you still want a monopoly to make back your investment. That is clearly false as people have made innovation in 3D printing where new designs are standardized for the benefit of the whole market.

Assumption 4 is the defacto state of things even if it were not the intention. People who invent useful things for the sake of useful things are clearly at a disadvantage against corporations or entities who have more money to hire lawyers.

There's already at least one case of a trivial patent for 3D printing stronger layers that expired being repatented again by another company, increasing legal uncertainty from implementing the technique in slicers and other software. Most slicer these days are open source, generally don't make money for its developers(at least not directly), but they do grow the 3D printing market through its active development. The slicers also happen to share code, unsurprising given that they are forks of one another. Clearly, this model is incompatible with the patent system as it stands.

I am not a die-hard supporter of IP protection laws, but your examples are classic survivorship bias, as well as falling victim to the broken windows fallacy.

Highly recommend the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly” which argues against IP law with a lot of historical references.

One such example is paint & coloring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the book - “In 1862, British firms controlled about 50 percent of the world market and French firms another 40 percent, with Swiss and German companies as marginal players. By 1873, German companies had 50 percent of the market, while French, Swiss, and British firms controlled between 13 percent and 17 percent each. In 1913, German firms had a market share of more than 80 percent, the Swiss had about 8 percent, and the rest of the world had disappeared.” Switzerland at the time had no patent protection, and Germany allowed processes to be patented in 1877 but not products themselves.

Parallels are harder to find today due to the expansion of IP law as a condition of trade with many developed nations, but the book does have some more recent examples.

If it says 'for a limited time', then wouldn't tying itmto the lifetime of the author be unconstitutional? Because strictly speaking it's impossible to predict whether an author's life will end.

"Progress of Science and useful Arts" isn't utilitarian in the sense "benefit society as a whole".

Doesn't say anything about "benefit society as a whole".