Imho it's absurd copyright should still be applicable when the author is gone. Only to the benefit of those who arguably contributed nothing to the creative work.
But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success?
I'd probably go with a N years since creation or until transfered (either by death, or sale, etc), whatever is longer.
This would give the author the ability to sell their creation, but it'd also let those that want to keep their baby do so, but my N years would likely only be around 20.
> But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success?
I think it should be like patents. You get it for twenty years, then it's in the public domain.
I don't think people are making TV shows and books because of the money they might make 21+ years from now.
Money may still be made from it, but that doesn't mean they were originally created with the idea that today they'd be making money this way. Most of the money is generally made within the first couple of years after release.
My preference for copyright would be 30 years or until death of the author, whichever is longer. If there's no living author or the rights have been transferred, then it's simply 30 years. This gives plenty of time to make money from it, it means the author never loses control over their own thing during their lifetime, and their family can benefit from it if the author dies shortly after publication.
More than this is just corporations milking creations from the past.
How can we infer from your comment that these shows or songs would have not existed if the copyright term was 20 years?
On the opposite side, we have a clear example from the patent system that 20 years is enough to have an endless pipeline of new products and inventions....
I am fairly supportive of IP law in general, but I don’t believe that the creators of Friends would have passed on making on the series if they were only going to able to monetize for 20 years.
20 years out at only a 5% discount rate pa is a 65% discount. At a more reasonable 15% discount rate for a proven show, you’re left with under 4% 20 years out. For an unproven pilot, you probably handicap that significantly more.
> But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success?
I deem it unfair that the family of a rich person gets anything at all, through inheritance or otherwise, so my answer would be yes.
The argument against inheritance is one based on meritocracy.
Specifically, the idea is that money should be gained based on how useful you are to society. Being the child of someone who was rich does not automatically mean you are useful to society. Hence, by this argument, it should not automatically mean you get to have your parents money.
This presupposes that all money, and in general all resources, including labor, belongs to the state (or society) except that which is explicitly allowed to people.
While that is a coherent point of view, it has some really unpalatable implications. The first one is that the assumption that society owns everyone's labor until proven otherwise is a great justification for various forms of effective slavery. The second one is that taking your "useful to society" statement at face value leads to things like the eugenics movements of the early 20th century, withholding (or confiscating) resources from those deemed "useless" to society, etc.
But even within this framework, making more money than you spend corresponds to producing more resources for society's benefit than you consume, and thereby building up a sort of "social credit". You then draw on this credit later in life (e.g. in retirement). It seems like the main claim you are making regarding inheritance is that this sort of social credit should not be transferable, right?
But that raises the question of whether people be able to give gifts to someone else at all. In this framework the answer is basically "no", because that would represent a transfer of the non-transferable social credit. But if they _should_, then should there be a substantive difference between a gift given 10 minutes before someone has a heart attack and receiving the same gift 20 minutes later? From an ethical point of view, I have a hard time with there being a difference between those two cases.
You can also earn money just by inheriting a large pile and hiring someone who manages it. Or work for someone who did that. Contributing to society at large is entirely optional for some people.
It's not a problem when someone inherits a sum that can be earned within an average person's lifetime. It's the proportions. A single person should not inherit the right over several thousand lifetimes of work output.
No, it's not better when "the state" or "society" decides as a group where this work output should be directed instead. But that's not the only alternative. When someone argues against inheritance using the "meritocracy" argument, I don't think this implies that people who would have worked for the heir's money should instead work on a project that all members of society have sanctioned.
> You can also earn money just by inheriting a large pile and hiring someone who manages it.
Just to be clear, in this situation what is going on is that you are holding the right to call on some resources (i.e. money) but are not exercising that right immediately. What you are doing instead is letting others use your right to get the resources they want now, with the understanding that in the future they will give you more resources. The "let others make use of resources that you can call on but don't need right now" part is in fact a _very_ useful social function; someone doing that is in fact contributing to society. Whether and how much they should be compensated for that is a good question, and I am open to arguments that the typical compensation for it is too high compared to the social utility of the activity.
And of course the exponential growth aspect makes things unsustainable over the long run here: people can't promise you more resources in the future indefinitely in the real world, though they have been able to do that for the last few centuries for various reasons. In conditions prior to that, here were various attempts at mechanisms for avoiding this exponential growth problem (e.g. the jubilee system described in the Bible is an interesting example of attempting to address the issue).
> A single person should not inherit the right over several thousand lifetimes of work output
Should a single person earn such a right to start with? In some cases, I'd think maybe: consider someone who saved society thousands of lifetimes of work effort in some way, e.g. via an invention. But I feel that this is an interesting question to ask as a baseline. Once we posit that someone _can_ own that much right-to-output, we're back to whether people can gift it and under what conditions...
> When someone argues against inheritance using the "meritocracy" argument, I don't think this implies that people who would have worked for the heir's money should instead work on a project that all members of society have sanctioned.
It seems like the basic options for dealing with inheritances are:
1) Some individual or group gets the money. This is inheritance as normally understood. This is the thing being argued against on "meritocracy" grounds above, afaict.
2) Society at large (the government) gets the money. This is estate taxes as normally understood, and corresponds to the "work on a project that all members of society have sanctioned" option.
3) The money just disappears. That is, there is effectively debt forgiveness for whoever owed money to the person who died. If they held cash, that would be the Federal Reserve. If they had bank accounts, that would be the relevant banks. If they held bonds, it's the bond issuer. For stocks maybe you can effectively "un-dilute" the other stockholders, sort of like a 0-price buyback. I have no idea what the real estate equivalent of this would be, or the equivalent for goods someone owns (books, clothes, furniture, piles of grain, etc).
I'm not thinking of other options so far, but open to ideas on what other options would be.
It seems to me that one glaring flaw with option (3) is that it can be converted to option (1) with some planning: if the main assets you hold at death are IOUs from people and such IOUs get canceled at death, then you can just carefully choose who owes you money and they end up effectively inheriting it. It's a lot less flexible from just holding whatever assets you want and then having a will, but for the really large fortunes it would not be difficult to structure it to be equivalent, I suspect, modulo the extent to which the "heirs" have control over the money before they come into their inheritance.
The basic issue with (3) is that it fundamentally doesn't _cancel_ the right-to-output; it just transfers it to someone else, still. I haven't been able to think of a good way so far to actually _destroy_ such a right, but I am not an expert in this area and haven't spent _that_ much time thinking about it.
Where does the money go if not to the family? Inheritance already drives family to kill each other, even knowing they'd be prime suspects. Imagine what faceless, emotionless governments would do if they wanted a little extra cash.
Imagine that an author passes away between handing the manuscript to a publisher and the first printing hitting store shelves.
Does the publisher owe anything to the author’s estate? Can another publisher immediately issue their own edition because it’s now in the public domain?
No, they don't owe an estate anything. We should be steering society away from entrenching intergenerational wealth transfers, not towards them.
We want people to be wealthy roughly in proportion to how much they contributed to the economy. The author's heirs can go stand on their own two feet.
Life + 70 is about making it attractive to big firms or other organisations to buy the rights to copyright; it removes the risk of the author dying suddenly. The idea is still absurd, as classics that should be generally available are still under this bizarre lock & key system. Tolkien only died in 1970; his legacy should be part of the public system by now. 1970 was a different time and era. Good stories are dying die because nobody can print mass copies of them.
So the publisher just gets to keep the author’s share of their joint contribution to the economy simply because it hasn’t been realized yet?
If you want to stop inter generational wealth transfer, work to limit that directly. This is just moving the profits away from an individual (the author) to a corporation (the publisher).
Not if copyright expires at the author's death; then it transfers to society at large because the publisher doesn't have the sole right to publish it anymore.
(Not advocating for this per se, just pointing out copyright expiration doens't necessarily transfer wealth to the publisher)
No, because the idea is that the right to a special monopoly would disappear. So the price of a book would drop from print costs + copyright to print cost only via the magical hand of the market. The "authors share" is a wholly legal idea that exists because everyone agrees the authors should get something for their work.
There is a reason my fiction bookshelf is 60% 1700s/1800s classics like Wilde or or Austin instead of authors I prefer like Tolkien or Mervyn Peake. Books out of copyright are cheaper (less margin to be extracted) and more easily available from a local bookshop, so I've bought more of them over the years.
I always laugh when I see people saying "we..". I always think "well, what are you doing on HN (or whatever) typing then? Get on with it! We don't want that!".
So don't base it entirely on the author's lifespan. We could go back to the original terms: a flat 14 years, plus a 14-year optional extension if the author is still alive.
> But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success?
No. This is the heart of the problem with the capitalist economic system. The vast majority of wealth belongs to people who inherited it, not the people actually creating all the value in society today.
If I have a long and successful life and decide to write my autobiography in my last year, my dependants should get almost nothing? What of the 95% manuscript I had in my drawer that my wife or child gets published after I am gone?
The greater point that copyright terms are out of control and absurd, I wholly agree with. Family interests controlling rights of a windfall legacy (e.g. Tolkien etc) for decades is crazy. Fifteen or twenty five years after first publication seems nearer the right mark to me.
Which is what we started with: a flat 14-year term to start with, regardless of whether the author is living or not, and a 14-year renewal allowed if the author is still living.
Then you get people that are lucky (author died 1 week after renewal) or unlucky (the opposite). But instead of proposing another competing proposal, this is reasonable enough that I can get behind it.
If copyrights disappeared after death, from a business standpoint it would become much harder to value a copyright when you also have to factor in the chance of the author dying and you immediately losing the related IP.
The fact that the authors death factors in at all automatically makes a young person's IP more valuable than an old person's. That's a really dumb system. It should expire x years after creation and the author's death should be irrelevant.
A more harmonious option could be X years or until the authors death, whichever is higher.
It preserves the “you own your work for your natural life”. Whether that’s what copyright should be is a separate question, and I think the answer is absolutely not, but easier to change gradually than all at once.
If X in death + X years is big enough, then age becomes less of a factor. Most IP's value drops as time goes on. In the majority of cases, after 70 years the value of IP is approaching zero, a further 10-50 years dependent on the creator's age won't have much more of an affect on the value that IP can create.
I agree X years after creation sounds like a much better system though.
Well, you could do 20 years after publication or 10 years after death, whichever comes sooner. Or maybe 10 and 5. I think most books make money only in the first few years anyway (but you want to make the term long enough that people aren't going to wait it out).
Depending on the length of the term, this may not work so well for types of books that have a longer tail (e.g., sheet music), but the current system has drawbacks too.
Imagine the new business line of having to arrange accidents for someone who holds a patent you wish to utilize. "Whoops they died, looks like we get to press a head"
Its indeed awkward to get this right, but i agree 70 years is nuts.
At this point I just find it weird it's tied to the author's death at all. It's not going to incentivize young people, to either live longer or produce more material.
Do you guys know this doesn't count for corporations (which I presume you have the most aversion against)? For example, it's irrelevant how long mr Disney has been dead because the company still exists.
I assume you're talking about work-made-for-hire? As far as I know, that's mostly a concept in common law countries; I'm not sure it applies to Switzerland. In most European countries, as far as I know, the rights of authorship always belong to natural persons.
How does that affect works exported from common-law countries to civil-law countries? Does the same work have different copyright holders in different jurisdictions?
