I’m just not convinced that most artists would change their behavior under no copyright, so somewhat agree. But the main issue is length of time.

The fact that copyright is longer than patents makes no sense. Patents prove that a shorter period is sufficient to stimulate large investment. And you have to pay for patents!

If you assume reasonable discount rates, the economic value plummets over time for an asset producing the same income (a bad assumption for copyright work in general).

At an 8% discount rate, extending copyright from 32 years to infinity adds less than 10% to its total present-day value. There are many good reform proposals, but mine would be something like 15ish years of free copyright, followed by 1 paid renewal for 15 years that is modest in price (eg $1000) and one extra 10 year renewal that is something like $1M. Meaning you have most economically neutral work free up at year 15, small business types having it affordable through 30 years, and the big Hollywood productions can go from 30-40 years for a modest (to them) fee to incentivize investments in expensive works. Movies come to mind. Give existing work a 20 year buffer on top of that to transition and there is a very small economic effect on everyone.

> next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore

While artists get paid less then many would like, royalties make up roughly 2/3rds of revenue of all the streaming giants, which is a huge amount of money. This recurring monthly, mostly passive income is still helpful for smaller professional bands in between touring.

When the indie band Xiu Xiu pulled out of Spotify many were quick to say it didn't matter that much except for exposure, but in interviews they pointed out that they lost a significant portion of they're yearly income from doing it just from the streaming royalties.

Many will say touring is where the real money is, but costs are rising and what I've heard its not as lucrative for smaller bands as it was in the past.

Some links: Spotify's own report on payouts, obviously a biased editorial, but good data nonetheless (for example 13K artists made 100k/year from spotify royalties alone) https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/payouts/

A transparent report on tour costs from a fairly popular indie band (notably they could make more if they were less principled or were a smaller band, but I think this report is still eye opening in terms of general costs) https://stereogum.com/2497822/los-campesinos-break-down-what...

> and oh the poor artists: next to none percentage wise gets much royalties anymore, streaming income is close to zero usually even if popular

Your argument is that artists aren’t paid enough, so we should go ahead and take it all the way to zero by law?

Author: I spent six months writing this story, I hope I can make some money selling it, it would be my dream to be able to keep doing this full time.

You: I will steal this, consume it, reprint it as I see fit and you will earn nothing.

Yeah... I don't think your opinions are worth much.

if copyrigth is abolished. amazon would publish every single boon without giving a cent to writers. it would be reqlly hard for writers to make a living. Im not a fan of copyrigth and how is being used at the moment but I don't really see an alternative where writers still get paid.

> Explicit (costly) patents can remain in place to secure industrial-grade research processes

I keep reading about big companies i) developing very similar drugs that are different enough to avoid patents, ii) using their size to prevent litigation.

So would keeping patents help?

How do you make a feature film - budget ranging from low millions to hundreds of millions of dollars - if anyone can copy it and view it without paying for it?

I'm struggling to see how the issues regarding low compensation from streaming services is going to be positively affected by abolishing copyright wholesale. That'd take the one way a creative can truly claim a stake towards their art.

Before the advent of LLMs, as now, my position on copyright is that what was had prior to Disneys lobyying efforts (which also then lead to similar laws being adopted outside the US showcasing the type of soft power and legislative inspirations the States previously could cause/the US does something so then Western Europe did the same) of roughly 25 years plus one extension was a fair compromise. One could also mirror patents and their length, seems like a solid avenue as well.

Lest we forget, while enforcement is far to limited, any success in defending FOSS projects and their licenses are only possible because we have copyright.

FLOSS only exists because of copyright. Without it you don’t get a utopia where everything can be read and copied, you get the opposite, companies not sharing their work, artists not releasing their work. Sacrificing the whole culture built on top of copyright for a maybe faster technical progress is incredibly myopic

Incidentally, the Statute of Anne was pushed by a printing guild after they lost their monopoly on printing. It was so unpopular[1] for them to get the monopoly back that they had to pivot and come up with some other way. So they figured they could do it in the name of writers. That worked!

1. John Locke, for example, opposed the monopoly.

Go back to the old 28 year system. Dump the renewal.

This would align it with the patent system.

> what leads to fast innovation

Content becomes cultural artifacts - the whole birthday song copyright issue should have told Americans how broken the system was.

Copyleft is built on copyright, do you think removing copyright protections is going to get people to release their source code?? I don't think so. Not unless you want to try and legislate some general copyleft law, but that's probably a nonstarter.

I'm skeptical patents play a significant role at encouraging research. No correlation between stronger patent laws and more innovation has ever been found.

I'm also in favor of very light copyright laws, e.g. I don't think anyone should claim they are Coca Cola.

> fast innovation and culture changes

Does this mean you think innovation and change in our culture is too slow? What’s you’re yardstick?

I believe copyright timeframes have gotten WAY out of hand and need to be reigned in to something more sensible, but I still think it's a valuable concept and don't want to see it abolished.

Patents on the other hand have become a total joke and I'd be happy to see them gone.

This would also mean copyleft would not work anymore. Companies would not be forced to release the source code of their modifications of (A)GPL software.

I think that would be a great loss

Why should patents stay protected?

You yourself say that allowing cheap duplication and tweaking is what leads to fast innovation. Why should I be restricted from cheap use of a patent I could use to further innovation?

I am fully supporting the idea of abolishing property rights for web services. Any web service must publish its entire stack, data, collected information and so on.

This would lead to explosive innovation and the pie would be growing rapidly. #growth-mindset #disruption

Im OK with limited forms of copyright. But the problem is that copyright business interests will ALWAYS pervert the original agreed-upon rules to their benefit.

Now something we saw that does work with audio, is statutory licensing. That rule alone allows spotify to be made. And thats also why a spotify-for-video cant be.

Thats why a local Jellyfin with 30TB of videos is better than all US based streaming services combined. Nobody is *legally* able to put a complete video library and pay access fees to relevent rightsholders.

You could always do that with copyright programs. The only thing that changed was the cost. The only example of somebody doing this was with the BIOS of the original IBM PC, but it was always possible and since nothing was copied it is legal. Somebody else did all the hard work.

Patents are the only protection that should exist for this type of thing. (though finding an algorithm worth patenting is hard - most are either a small variation easy to work around, or so old that prior art exists from 50 years ago).

in the few books I've read about technological breakthroughs, the vast majority come from academia. I'm thinking about Eckert's adoption of IBM's ticker tape for commands rather than just rote data [0], all the inventions that came out of the NDRC [1] (for better or worse), the ENIAC, FORTRAN, how reliant solid state devices were on understanding quantum theory [2], and so many other examples. Paul E. Ceruzzi's "Computing: A Concise History" goes over much of this (including making note of the US military's heavy usage of LLMs for the Iraq War pre-empted the consumer push for LLMs)

most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations

IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work

(0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Comm... (2)https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...

You might be right, but I think we need at least 10 years before we can really start this discussion, and the discussion itself needs to take many more years.

It's funny to hear people repeat, "AI will replace you!" Then beg for more training data of humans being humans.

I disagree with restrictions on digestive use of a work. If I legally acquire a book, I should be able to run that data through an algorithm, and I should be allowed to share the result freely as long as it's not replicating the original.

The purpose of copyright under the US Constitution, a text relevant to the courts the EFF is addressing here, is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts by giving creators temporary exclusive rights to their works"

It is not to "compensate for the cost of production", nor is it to ensure that business plans of major music publishers happen to be successful.

The EFF is correct to say here that copyright shouldn't be perverted to limiting market competition generally, but limited to protecting a specific works.

I don't think the reason for copyright law is compensation, per se. It's ownership: being in a position where the creator is able to decide what to do with it. Compensation being one option, but also restricting use our controlling access.

Copyright has nothing to do with cost of production. What does it cost for me to doodle something on a napkin? Nothing, yet I still enjoy the full protections copyright law offers for that doodle (with the exception today being AI companies. Apparently, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it)

The cost of producing decent things hasn't gone down. Also the cost of slop is not that low, just subsidised.

based

And what if that actually leads to less open-ness? If I license code under a copyleft license, users are forced to give back their changes to the public. Without copyright they would not be forced to do this, which means less work will be published.