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| ▲ | observationist 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain. Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing. No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics. Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this. Until it changes, pirate everything. | | |
| ▲ | Cider9986 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Anyone looking to start pirating check out fmhy.net (free media heck yeah) | |
| ▲ | goku12 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying). | | |
| ▲ | kube-system an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The first copyright law granted 14 years to everything and 21 years for works already in production. The first copyright law in the US granted 14 years + a renewable 14 years. | |
| ▲ | observationist an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically. Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries. This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most. It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc. No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry. Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril. No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers. The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput. | | |
| ▲ | Angostura 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted | | |
| ▲ | observationist 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth. A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue. |
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| ▲ | edent 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright. | | |
| ▲ | kibwen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Taking the death date into account is literally already how prevailing copyright law works. You can just make it conditional on publish date. | | |
| ▲ | edent 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but Life + 70 means it is unlikely that anyone will benefit from the death soon. | | |
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| ▲ | benj111 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | TBF there's currently a massive perverse incentive in that we want to encourage creators to create, but then allow the successful ones to retire making money from past works. | |
| ▲ | nullc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits. Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity. | | |
| ▲ | Supermancho an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits. This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a negative signal. | |
| ▲ | pyuser583 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The distinction between author and their estates is fascinating: the stereotype is estates mismanaging the art, but that usually happens because the estates want to be “artistic” themselves. Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason. JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons). | |
| ▲ | toast0 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits. An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard; but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption amount means that few estates pay any tax. > Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of an untimely death. |
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| ▲ | cubefox 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe 100 years after birth instead. | | |
| ▲ | cestith 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That’s a disincentive to authors in their later years if it’s a straight rule. We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something. | | |
| ▲ | notarobot123 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding your only motivation to create or share anything is the opportunity to extract as much value from society as possible. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Many people find motivation to give to their heirs in their last phase of life. |
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| ▲ | notarobot123 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This isn't a bad idea. It would prevent the constant recycling of copyrighted works and bias the creative economy towards newer works. It seems the bias is in the other direction at the moment. |
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| ▲ | B1FF_PSUVM 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for free - while a piece of land pays property taxes. | | |
| ▲ | tacticalturtle 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The state isn’t enforcing your rights for free - you still have to hire a lawyer and pay legal expenses yourself. The state is just providing the infrastructure where you are allowed to make a claim, if you choose to do so. This is like complaining that businesses get to use roads for free - ignoring that we all pay taxes already and built this infrastructure for enabling exactly that purpose. | | |
| ▲ | cestith 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Copyright infringement in the United States has both civil and criminal elements at law. | | |
| ▲ | tacticalturtle 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Touché. This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses. I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. I fully support copyright enforcement being funded by intellectual property taxes: * You declare your property’s worth. * You pay IP taxes on that worth. * You cannot sure for recovery of more than that worth, total. If you have a song worth $1M, and sue 2 people for $500K, then consider it sold. If someone steals a car from you, you can’t collect its full worth each from multiple thieves. And if you have a $1B film, you can’t sue for $1B if you’re only paying taxes on $1M. Why are your and my taxes subsidizing theft from the public domain? Let them pay for it, just like our property taxes pay for roads and schools and fire departments and police. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Criminal cases aren't a substitute for civil suits, not for copyright... or for any other type of loss. People generally do have to pay their own way to bring a civil case to recover for damages in a copyright infringement case... or any kind of case. The fines/jail time typically ascribed by a criminal case do not go into a victims bank account. A criminal case is between the government prosecutor and the defendant. The copyright holder wouldn't even be a party to the case. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Many states do collect restitution funds from revenues generated by the work of encarcerated people, and those funds do go to victims. I don't know that that applies to copyright infringement, but it is possible to get some recovery from criminal proceedings. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system an hour ago | parent [-] | | If a criminal case ever happens, it is a possibility that restitution can be awarded. But generally, if somebody's infringing your copyright and you want to seek damages, you need to bring a civil case yourself. Well over 99% of copyright cases are civil. |
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| ▲ | tacticalturtle 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Retail businesses pay property taxes to support that. But they don’t? Copyright infringement is a federal crime - your property taxes don’t fund that. The income tax that we all pay, including the IP holders, do the funding. Additionally retail theft, at least in my jurisdiction of Massachusetts is prosecuted by the state - my income taxes fund that, not property taxes. |
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| ▲ | cestith 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sometimes for physical property the police take it and the owner can get it back from them. That much is sometimes free. My motorcycle got returned, but if I wanted compensation for the substantial damage done to it I would have had to get it from the thief. Often the property is never found and returned. |
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| ▲ | kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little It's even more incongruous that you'd have to "register" for your rights. Intellectual property are recognized as an inherent right that doesn't require any registration at all, under the 1886 Berne Convention. Although the US was not a signatory until 1989. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg an hour ago | parent [-] | | In the US, you do not need to register your copyright. It is entirely optional, and you can still enforce an unregistered copyright. | | |
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| ▲ | simonh 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Creators pay tax on their income. We all get legal protections for our property. | | |
| ▲ | boomlinde 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Real property owners also pay tax on their income. Income is taxed. Real property is taxed. Intellectual property is not. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Taxing copyright ownership is effectively impossible. Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written. Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed | |
| ▲ | bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital gains on sold real property (this "often" of course varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may pay some if the conditions are right), when selling intellectual property you often (same proviso as before, only inverted) pay capital gains. | |
| ▲ | simonh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes on buildings such as council taxes on houses, specifically to pay for municipal services, but not generally on land. If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods. | | |
| ▲ | closewith 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are some analogues of a land tax in the UK. Council tax for residential property, rates for businesses, and the upcoming mansion tax. |
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| ▲ | kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties, nor should it be. | |
| ▲ | brookst 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land. It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Copyright is easy to appraise. Estimate the stream of payments it will generate; take the net present value using an appropriate estimate of a safe interest rate. Will it always match the actual value? No, of course not. Sometimes popularity changes a lot, or interest rates change a lot. I'm not sure you really need a proprerty tax on copyrights though. They generate taxable income until they expire. It seems more fair to tax the actual income rather than appraised value, to avoid problems from cases where the appraisal is too high or too low. | |
| ▲ | closewith 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is actually a solved problem. It is self-assessed valuation with compulsory sale at declared value, known as the Harberger Tax. | | |
| ▲ | boomlinde 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The effect of a Harberger tax on intellectual property would probably be an upwards transfer of ownership of intellectual property, from people who can't afford to pay taxes on whatever those 100,000x more wealthy are willing to pay. A Harberger tax might work well in economist-land, where any discrepancy between what wealth I could extract from my property and what wealth I actually extract from it represents an inefficiency that can be addressed by a transfer of ownership at market value at no inconvenience to the original owner. In reality, there are many other reasons than market value that I might hold onto intellectual property. | |
| ▲ | ralferoo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is only a solution if you think it's fair to have a regular ownership tax on top of the tax paid when purchasing / selling something. | | |
| ▲ | closewith 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's a solution to the problem raised by the GP - how to fairly value IP. This whole thread is about how many countries with land taxes don't similarly tax other assets like IP. Whether you think it's fair or not is another question - the blocker isn't fair valuation. | | |
| ▲ | bryanrasmussen 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | the solution to how to fairly value IP was provided by the owner, capital gains tax happens on sale of IP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220210 capital gains does not happen on sale of land generally.
These two things are obviously taxed differently because it is to the value of the government to do so, and the value of the government is supposed in many countries to somehow translate into a value for society. |
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| ▲ | wang_li an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a dumb system as it doesn't account for the fact that a piece of property's value can change over time. You write a book, you have to declare its value prior to knowing it's value to consumers. If you aren't independently wealthy already you will never be able to become wealthy by writing books, paintings, songs, etc. as you will have to declare their value quite low in order to pay taxes on them. If it becomes popular the publishing company comes along and forcibly buys it from you for the low value you had to put on it because you couldn't pay the tax, then raises it's value far beyond what the author could afford and profits from the movies rights and etc. |
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| ▲ | stevekemp 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > while a piece of land pays property taxes. In some countries taxes are annual. In the UK you pay taxes when you buy/sell property, or land. You don't need to pay land/property taxes every year. | | |
| ▲ | lanceflt 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Council taxes are property taxes and are monthly. | | |
| ▲ | stevekemp an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Council taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for rubbish collection & etc. However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those. In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing.. (And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.) | |
| ▲ | mvc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs. | |
| ▲ | dghf 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, technically they're annual, but you're allowed to pay them in arrears over 10 or 12 months. |
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| ▲ | ivell 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | IPR is a form of incentive for creators in service of betterment of the society (it also could be detrimental like Mein Kempf though). On the other hand real estate does not need such extra incentives. Need or greed is enough. | | |
| ▲ | GuestFAUniverse 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The book title is "Mein K_a_mpf". It's related to the latin "c_a_mpus" / battle field -- like most European languages, there are close relationships to the neighbors. While there were shifts in sounds: in this case not. |
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| ▲ | SolarNet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Land is scarce. Also, generally, property taxes are paid to the city/county that makes that land desirable to live in. | |
| ▲ | piaste 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The enforcement isn't the issue, it's the scarcity. |
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| ▲ | freejazz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If its the term that's the issue, it's the term, not copyright itself. Which do you think it is? | |
| ▲ | damnitbuilds 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Almost all works make all their money in the first five years after creation. 5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us. Fuck the copyright cartels. | | |
| ▲ | AJ007 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Generative AI raises a lot of questions as to the value of copyright to society. There's a very dangerous direction I suspect things are tipping toward with generative AI: the big creative rights holders / representatives are going to be paid big royalties, in perpetuity for generative AI. The amount of money the RIAA could get from Google, for example, may exceed the enterprise values of all record labels combined. Even more scary, deals written in to national law could join copyright cartels and mega corporations at the hip and effectively ban all but the largest multi-trillion dollar companies from training and serving generative AI models. Local AI models you download and run today - whether LLMs or image generation would be illegal. These models were trained and tuned on the collective work of human civilization. If someone uses a generative model to assist them in creating something new, how much intellectual property rights does that individual deserve? How much intellectual property rights do the dead, dying, and their rights owners deserve? What was black or white 5 years ago is now grey. What remains of black or white today will all be grey in 5 years as generative AI proliferates through all forms of software and real time rendering (if my iPhone camera is using generative AI to make an optical zoom look more detailed, how much is really my photo? How much of it is Disney's?) Even without diving in to the privacy & censorship aspects of these issues, I think there's a very good case for completely ending copyright in the long term (leaving exceptions for things such as a human's own likeness?) At least in the near term, 5 years sounds ok. | | |
| ▲ | freejazz an hour ago | parent [-] | | A human's own likeness is not copyrightable. Hard to take posts about copyright doctrine seriously when they are premised on complete misunderstanding. | | |
| ▲ | wang_li 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There is a legally protected right of publicity. You cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their permission. | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > There is a legally protected right of publicity. There is not a general right of publicity in federal law in the US; in certain states there is with different parameters, including as to who is even protected. There is a false endorsement provision in the Lanham Act, 15 USC § 1125(a), that provides a very narrow protection around misleading commercial endorsement, though. |
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