| ▲ | latexr 8 hours ago |
| > "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office. You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law. > when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business. That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. |
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| ▲ | cptnapalm an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Termination of Transfer is what happened to the Friday the 13th franchise. The screenwriter wound up owning the name Jason Voorhees, but not the adult visual of Jason. As I understand it, the F13 franchise owners could have made movies with adult Jason Voorhees as long as they don't call him Jason Voorhees. All in all it was a mess. I think it's all resolved now, but the situation did tank the online game that a lot of people enjoyed. |
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| ▲ | Ntrails 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > You have to wait half a lifetime?! Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property. I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc) |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | How about 14? Which as the article explains was the original copyright term. |
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| ▲ | crazygringo 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about. Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...? Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it. |
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| ▲ | johannes1234321 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ... Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You answer your own question. Yes, intellectual property rights should be different than physical property rights. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, they're not different. If I can't sign away the title to my car, it's literally worthless. Exactly the same is true of my IP rights. | | |
| ▲ | lukifer 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0] Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand. "Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced. Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract. I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gZZHu4TBk | |
| ▲ | AlexandrB an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They're absolutely different. IP rights are a creating of artificial scarcity for what would otherwise be an infinitely-copyable work. Physical property rights are a codification of rights to a naturally scarce item. IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP. It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in a commercial way at least). Compare this to traditional property rights that merely prevent you from walking up to the owner and taking their (non copyable stuff) - a much lesser restriction. This is why IP rights need to have limitations like a time limit, but I don't see why other limits like non-transferability are out of the question. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's very simple if you spend more than 12 seconds thinking about it. Non-transferability devalues the property you're trying to sell. Why is that so hard to understand? You're free to negotiate such terms, but the buyer can and will push back. |
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| ▲ | falcor84 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What? Car leasing is a massive market, and a large percentage of people and companies are very happy to pay to access cars and trucks without owning the title. Same goes for companies happily building on top of leasehold properties whenever it makes financial sense for them. And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Valid argument. Car analogies usually break down at some point, and leasing is a definite weakness of that one. But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos, if you want to restrict peoples' rights to buy and sell property of either a physical or intellectual nature. | | |
| ▲ | falcor84 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Good point, but in this case I'm arguing for the exact opposite: I'm suggesting that (natural) people are the ones owning IP, and companies only lease it. I was just making the case that a lease is not "worthless". |
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| ▲ | NetMageSCW 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why? |
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| ▲ | Asmod4n an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can't sign away your copyright in germany, you can only hand over the rights of distribution of your work. | |
| ▲ | scotty79 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "you wouldn't steal a car" again? | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | xhkkffbf an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years. My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business. |
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| ▲ | toast0 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years. Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names. You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well. |
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| ▲ | 7bit 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away. In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work. |
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| ▲ | vidarh 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions. But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Which is one of the reasons public domain is problematic in some jurisdictions because it requires you to waive rights you can't necessarily waive. Yes, Louisiana somewhat notwithstanding, the US is basically common law like the UK (and much of the Anglosphere/Commonwealth). As a bit of trivia, the MIT License was essentially created because of issues with "just" making X public domain. https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license |
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| ▲ | oniony 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So how does ghostwriting work then? Lots of books have unaccredited ghostwriters. | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not a Lawyer, but this seems like work-for-hire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire I assume Germany has something like this (possibly a EU requirement). It would cover more than just ghostwritten books. Most software is written in a similar manner. Microsoft didn't write windows, lots of ghostwriting programmers did. | |
| ▲ | pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The author never had the rights, as they worked under contract, so they don't need to sign them away. But we also the right to be named as author is not a requirement to be named as author. | |
| ▲ | Lariscus 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is handled in the employment contract. The "Urheberrecht" is not transferable only inheritable, but you can grant "Nutzungsrechte" which means "rights of use". So in your contract you just grant your employer unrestricted and exclusive rights of use. |
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| ▲ | nandomrumber 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions? |
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| ▲ | latexr 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fairly, respectfully, and without exploitation? Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat... | | |
| ▲ | isodev 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I don't like what I signed up for freely I believe the post makes a good case that "freely" doesn't mean by choice at all. In other words, not what people consider freely. | | | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely". | | |
| ▲ | latexr 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > "Exploitation" isn't an objective term. It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit. > It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely". From my first post: > If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them. If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely. | | |
| ▲ | philipallstar 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely. How do you define "swindle"? | | |
| ▲ | wffurr 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are. Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for. | |
| ▲ | falcor84 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's what we have courts and juries for. If a jury unanimously agrees that a typical person in a reasonable situation and with full understanding of the conditions would not be willing to sign such a contract because it would strongly go against their interest, then the person who did sign it has likely been swindled. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions? If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference). |
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| ▲ | tempfile 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is really not any harder to define than "freely". Presumably by "what I signed up for freely" you mean "what I signed up for without any coercion, threat of violence, etc". The people using "exploitation" here just mean that those conditions also include the implied threat of not having money to live. This is a real material condition which affects what people are prepared to agree to (even if they might be able to find a better offer by shopping around). It is not hard to understand, and I suspect you are not trying to understand it. | | |
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| ▲ | cnnlives8472 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > You have to wait half a lifetime?! I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us. With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary. (Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.) |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | fragmede 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever. | | |
| ▲ | IAmBroom 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not what the statistics indicate. Not at all. 7% have uncertain lifetimes, >= (current value). |
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