I think would diminish independent author rights. Quite often, a novel will become popular only decades after publishing, and I think the author should be able to profit on the fruits of their labour without wealthy corporations tarnishing their original IP, or creating TV shows and the link with no reperations to the creator.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
I like Cory Doctorow's analogy: Artists are, to a large degree, at the mercy of big companies (publishers, music labels, etc), who have the leverage to force artists to sign over all of their rights. Giving artists more rights is like giving your kid more lunch money when it's being stolen by a bully: no matter how much money you give your kid in that situation it's not going to give him any lunch.
What's interesting is that this is true of all creators, not just artists.
Making money means running a business, and running a business requires more than just creating something. You also have to identify a good market for that creation, and find a way to distribute to them, and provide a viable model for them to pay for it, and (the hardest part) out-compete all the other businesses who are doing the same.
This is true for cooks. It's not good enough to create a meal. You have to also scope out the local market, find a good location, build a restaurant or a stand, attract customers, and sell your meals. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept cooking for free, or going to work for a restaurant who's going to do all those hard parts and take the bulk of the profits.
This is true for computer programmers. It's not good enough to write a program. You also have to build a business, find customers, attract them through ads or marketing or viral growth, collect credit carts, and sell your product. And if you aren't willing to do that, then you either need to accept coding things that make no money, or go to work for corporation or startup who will pay you a salary while collecting bigger profits.
Etc.
For some reason artists are the only group that makes a big stink about this situation, and feels that they should get the benefits of running a business without doing the work or taking the risk of running a business.
Artists are not the only ones who make a stink about this; it's inherent to the capitalist mode of production. Everyone involved in a venture is risking something, but the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture. Other kinds of risk are solely rewarded with monetary wages at sub-profit margins. That's why labor unions exist, and why the nation's elites work tirelessly to stop them.
But with artists, there's a particular extra wrinkle, in that the law created a middle tier of reward specifically for the efforts of creative workers. Copyright was specifically intended to allow authors to have their own business ventures without necessarily having to share in the same risks that equity owners do. So, naturally, those equity owners all colluded with one another to steal this other form of equity and wear it as a second shell.
> the law only rewards specific kinds of risk with equity ownership over the venture
I would argue that it's not solely the law rewarding that kind of risk, it's the market. There is no law that says that only equity owners can enjoy massive profits. Some employees get paid 7 figures, 8 figures, or more, even without equity.
Generally speaking, the rewards go to the hardest parts, the riskiest parts, the parts with the least supply and the most demand.
You are taking far more risk by being a business creator and blazing a new trail, than you are by studying a fixed set of knowledge and techniques to train to become a Front End Software Engineer or some other kind of well-defined high-demand pre-defined role. And the evidence for this is the fact that there are millions of people who've shaped themselves into that safer mould, and very few who have done the former.
And this doesn't just apply to owners vs employees, it applies within each group, too. There are far more restauranteurs than search engine founders, as the former is simply a less risk and less competitive endeavor. (Competing with your local market vs competing with the world.) And artists who create unique works tend to earn a lot more than copycats. Artists who master rare skills tend to earn a lot more than people generating stuff off Midjourney. Etc. Risk tends to go hand-in-hand with reward.
Of course there are exceptions, e.g. rent-seeking, sabotage, monopoly, collusion, etc. that can earn you a lot without you providing a lot of value or taking a lot of risk. And a huge role of the law is to make as much of this illegal as possible, to force people into more value-creating activities by process of elimination.
People who end up leading successful companies are often able to do so not because they’re more willing to take risks than others, but rather because they have experienced more good luck than others. Take Bill Gates, for example. His parents sent him to an exclusive private school, which afforded him regular access to computers from an early age, giving him valuable experience that most others his age could not access, through no fault of their own. Microsoft was able to make a crucial business deal with IBM because Gates’ mother knew the CEO. Someone else with equal skill and appetite for risk would have found it much more difficult to be as successful as Gates was, because their parents were likely not rich and not connected to the right people.
Luck is always going to play a role. No one has ever said that life is fair, and no system is based on life being fair. One of the many reasons that progressive taxation is justified.
I don't know that A Game of Thrones is a good example, at all.
The series was already remarkable commercial success before the TV adaptation. A Feast for Crows debuted at #1 on the NYT list in 2005.
The series sold millions of copies prior to the TV series. That's more successful than the average successful Fantasy novel by orders of magnitude.
If the books sold even more copies after being adapted, that's because HBO put the story on TV, not because of anything the author did.
And, of course, even if the first book in the series lost it's copyright after 28 years (nearly three decades!), the all the rest of books in the series would still under copyright, and the HBO wouldn't be able to access the ending without the authors help, as it hasn't even been published yet. The most HBO could have done without Martin's involvement would have been to create glorified fan fiction, while leaving themselves open to lawsuits about any similarities to any later books in the series under copyright.
Almost all the money almost any artist makes comes in the first 28 years. It is hard to see why we should deprive all of society from benefiting from using, building on, or remixing culture, to slightly increase the leverage that a handful of exceptionally rare winners get.
An of course, there is a huge gap between 14+14 and today's maximalist copyright regime.
> Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
Using your example and the rules suggested in the grandparent post, GRRM's copyright would have been set to initially expire in 2024, where he would be able to pay $100k to renew it until 2038. Handmaiden's Tale works in a similar way, with the initial expiration in 2013.
BigCorps could do a lot of things under a new regime, but they are already doing shitty things. I'd rather deal with the current problems and then see if/what kind of new issues crop up, and then course-correct then.
GRRM is already beating them at that game by publishing a new book in the series every couple decades. That might become a common tactic in such a copyright environment
So add another 14 to the original 14+14, giving 42 years of maximum protection. That would cover your examples and require active renewal to send abandonware to the public domain earlier. I'd love to see shorter terms, but active renewal would already greatly enrich the public domain.
> Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985
It was already a classic by the year 2000 and Margaret Atwood has made more than enough money and was an icon even back then. I say this as a fan and someone who paid to meet her.
Copyright should ensure that artists make a living, not enable them to make a killing.
A person who wants to coast off the success of a single creation for eternity and not feel compelled to make future creations is not an artist.
They are a capitalist.
Artists create, despite the destitution, because they want to create and feel strongly compelled to create. Art is about that compulsion.
An artist wants enough money to pay rent/mortgage, raise a family, have a hobby, not be in debt, etc. But when Daniel Hardcastle received 0 pounds from his book because the publisher was a scammy cunt, he doesn't stop writing because there's no money in it, he continues to write despite the lack of profit. Because that's what he feels compelled to do.
When youtube made it impossible for animators to make money on Youtube, Arin Hanson (Egoraptor) started paying people to make animations out of his content, including people who started out doing it entirely without their permission. When many channels make pure profit from creating clip shows or compilations of their content, instead of throwing lawyers or the Youtube machine at those people, he paid someone to make official versions.
Compare how those two jackwads acted (the fine brothers), trying to trademark the concept of a "reaction video", to all the different channels and groups that do "Power Hour" or variety content like Good Mythical Morning. They even joke about how they are all stealing from each other. They know that their audience is looking for their unique output, not a specific format, and that protecting such a format would be a waste for everyone.
Because a real artist does not say "How dare you make better product with my formula", a real artist says "Aww man they used my formula to make something great, I should figure out how to make something great and up my game".
The sin in artistry is someone taking your style or content and shamelessly stealing it because it's a profitable business, rather than riffing on it or iterating on it.
Weird Al generally gets permission to do his work despite the law being clear that he does not have to because artistry is about respect and effort and collaboration.
More importantly for copyright law, despite no legal protection for a "Power hour" format, many groups are able to profit off it simultaneously, because art is not some winner takes all market. Copyright is not about enabling you to profit off of a work indefinitely, copyright is about ensuring that Greedy McBusinessman cannot take your book and sell it for cheaper because he doesn't have to pay your rent and does that for a hundred other artists. It's about who owns the Rights to Copy a work.
If a novel you wrote 15 years ago becomes hugely successful you can capitalize with a sequel. Maybe GRRM would have written them a little faster in that universe.
Presumably people would consider a Song of Ice and Fire sequel by GRRM to be "official" and everything else "fanfiction", even if the fanfiction manages to appear in bookstores
Just in case you're actually unaware, the Organization for Transformative Works https://archiveofourown.org/ Archive Of Our Own (typically shortened to AO3) is where a tremendous amount of such fiction is archived.
Someone who buys books at Barnes & Noble is not going to print online fan fiction on demand. If you think this is something a “mainstream consumer” would do, I think you’re very out of touch with the average person.
Isn’t reading stuff on the internet more mainstream than buying things at Barnes and Noble? Not necessarily those specific things, but the notion that something needs to be physically available at a bookstore to be relevant is at best dated.
I think you should also assume it's called "Archive of our own" because of the same sense that Woolf had in "A Room of one's own". This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed.
So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming that they can thrive in a shared space and then discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason, they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by employers despite having the same skills as successful male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to have a place of your own.
That's an interesting perspective, I hadn't considered that the name might be a reference to A Room of One's Own.
My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the community, which means everyone migrates to the next site which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3 run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of them
This is not an endorsement of the work, but there's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I hear 50 Shades of Gray is another fanfic that went mainstream.
A book nerd could come up with a much longer list, but I know there's a ton more illegal unlicensed! Harry Potter fan fic.
“The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published by [E. L.] James episodically on fan fiction websites under the pen name ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’.”
as much as I think the copyright 14 years thing is one of the more contemptible ideas well to do programmers have on how to improve things by making things worse for people who make less money, I don't think copyright is longer than 14 years is the only reason works by the original author of a series earns more money than fan fiction.
How do the sequels affect this? I read this once more in the same discussion so I am curious.
Let's assume the 1st book goes public. I should be able to use those characters and their known relationship in any which way, no? What's wrong with that, copyright wise?
For a novel of middling success, like Game of Thrones ca 2004, as is the argument here? Why would anyone write and publish that sequel? Nobody would buy it if it was not from the original author.
I mean, that sounds like a win from the point of view of copyright.
The whole purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of new works after all. In GRRM's case, the more successful his works became, the less he wrote which is kind of the opposite of what copyright was intended to do.
14+14=28 years. That minimum being proposed here is longer than a patent lasts for.
Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
(And remember: It's really not my problem, as a regular Joe, when an author or inventor creates something that doesn't catch on right away -- if at all. Success is not guaranteed.)
> Why should we protect the work of an author for a lengthier term than that of an inventor?
Well, independently coming up with the same solution to a given problem is a lot more likely than independently writing the same novel. Personally, the chilling of independent invention is the thing I find most obnoxious about patents.
I might independently invent a cartoon character of a black mouse with a tan face that wears white gloves and red bibs and wish to publish a comic book featuring that character on the cover, but I'll never be able to do that -- no matter how long I wait: We have trademark law in the way.
Trademarks can go away by various mechanisms, but they never automatically time out as a mere function of the calendar. As long as Disney keeps using Mickey Mouse, they will retain and defend this well-known trademark and others will most assuredly be forbidden from using it. It will be impossible for me to outlive The Walt Disney Company.
The addition of copyright makes it all a double-whammy. Trademarks can already last as long as time itself; copyright doesn't also have to be that way at all.
14+14=28 years is a Really Long Time to exclusively control a work. Would films like 1997's Donny Brasco and Jackie Brown really have never been made, do you suppose, if the creators knew that by the end of 2025 anyone would be able to copy them freely? I remember 1997 very well, and at that time 2025 seemed like something in the impossibly-distant future -- a lot like 2053 does today.
(Also: Thanks for the reminder. I've independently invented a small (but non-zero) number of physical things that I've subsequently found to be patented. It's annoying when that happens, but I manage. I think one of those is timing out soon and I really should check on it.)
Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Way before 2011 all my friends were telling me to read it. It was so popular that Neil Gaiman - before 2011 - wrote a famous blog post criticizing R R Martin fans for being upset that R R Martin was not giving a timeline for writing his next book (and implied he may never complete the series).
It also consistently won some of the top awards prior to 2011.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy
IP laws were created on the Modern Age (that is not, you know, our modern one) arguably to protect the technique of book copyists, and very probably to improve kingdoms taxation and control what knowledge the bourgeoisie could access... at that time when the bourgeoisie was a persecuted fringe group.
> A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity
Yes - the catalyst was the amazing (early on) TV series, and not the book.
> IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.
In the case of GoT, if the TV series had never happened then the popularity wouldn't have happened. The author's books got popularity based on other people's efforts.
Yes, there was some stuff done that sold some books, and some more stuff done (under licence from the author) that sold waaaaaay more books (that goes to the author) and generates cash.
What's the problem, I suppose? The author definitely did better out of the TV production than vice versa.
"Quite often" = actually quite rare. I think you greatly underestimate the number of new novels published each year.
Your first two examples would have been covered under a 14+14 copyright period.
I do not think a 28-year copyright period would have kept Atwood from writing The Handmaiden's Tale, do you? She was a millionaire by the time that copyright expired.
I don't think looking at peak sales for outlying cases should affect copyright limits. When were peak sales for Shakespeare's Hamlet? Darwin's On the Origin of Species? Marx's Das Kapital?
The justification for US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The problem you point out is that right can be transferred to publishers and others. Note that since 1978 it's possible for an author to terminate that transfer after 35 years, which is well after those peaks you mentioned.
What you've not mentioned is the ability for other authors to build on existing ideas. Disney famously profited by re-telling public domain stories, but will come down on you if you re-tell their stories. Speaking of fantasy, you can now write stories which take place in Oz, but make sure it doesn't have ruby slippers as that's a detail from the movie, which is still under copyright.
It is. A common argument against using "intellectual property" is how beliefs about tangible property - land and objects - shouldn't be applied to copyright, patent, etc., so using the term is an implicit acceptance of a false narrative.
My assertion is much weaker and therefore much easier to defend — even if you agree with copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, it is not to out advantage as individuals to support grouping them into one umbrella term as it muddies the waters.
Trademark and service marks are a whole different ball game from copyright. To group them together confuses everyone and is therefore only beneficial for those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
The opinion that it is real is also not a fact. We're not talking about physical things. They're made up rules about made up things. It can all be different if we agree to make it so.
IP isn't a concept that has existed in all cultures for all time. It's not inherent to group dynamics or humanity. It's not even a concept that's fully respected by cultures that claim to care about it.
I'd push even further and say it encroaches, if not outright invades the conversation about who owns what data. Both are terribly muddy waters, to be sure, but something worth hashing out since we live in an age of information that is both accessible and under threat, so the real question is where do we want to collectively steer this ship?
Law is all about enforced opinion on what others should say and do.
Even property is a misnomer on that regard. The proper of someone is certainly more spontaneously matchable with one corpse. If anything, a land encompasses people, and someone psychological traits are indeed more property of the person but they can make it lasts through some expression of it only in external support which are distinct from their proper self.
Fantasy book are a good example. A Games of Thrones was first released in 1996 but had middling success. It was only after 2011 that the series exploded in popularity. Good Omens main peak was ~15 years after release. Hell, some books like Handmaiden's Tale were published in 1985 but only reached their peak in 2010.
IP law was originally to protect artist and authors from the wealthy, but now it seems to have the opposite intent.