Just to try to understand this, do you think anyone should be able to make, say, a Harry Potter movie right now paying nothing to the author?

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function_seven 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to be published, with the author of those works knowing that they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been incentivized.

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jimmydddd 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What about the other 99.99999% of authors?

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Aerroon 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?

But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.

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OkayPhysicist 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?

That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then a game development studio made a series of wildly successfully videogames based on his work, which definitely made way more money than his books, to the point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I struggle to imagine how it could be just that the videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him nothing.

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TitaRusell 4 hours ago | parent [-]

He sold his rights to CDPro. Also the videogame made him famous- I for one read one of his books BECAUSE of the game and I'm sure that I am not the only one.

There's a reason why writers want their books to become videogames and or movies. I would not be surprised if the Tolkien estate made more money after the Peter Jackson movie came out than in all the decades before...

And most importantly artists are not children. If they don't have business sense enough to read a contract they should hire an agent.

	▲	OkayPhysicist 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> He sold his rights to CDPro. Yeah, and why do you think he had those rights to sell? Copyright is a good thing, with flaws in its current implementation.

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mindslight 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why not?

This is a fantastic example - the Harry Potter movies have already been wildly profitable, surely enough to have solidly incentivized their creation. And they are now firmly part of our collective cultural background, to the point that most of the value comes from the network effects of people who have watched them rather than the works themselves.

The first book was written in 1997, and released as a movie in 2001. The last book was written in 2007, and released as a movie in 2011.

Putting a 20-year limit on the copyright would mean that one could use the characters/story (from the book) starting in 2017 - either riffing on them or perhaps even a complete remake. And this would still be 6 years after the final movie was released. The movies themselves would of course each have their own 20 year periods of monetization. You could legally watch the whole series of movies on a personal computer starting in 2031, which is still 5 years away. This all seems eminently reasonable to me.