I really, really hate to play Devil's Advocate, but certain hardcore WP'ers actually do have a point about the worldwide overextension of copyrights. Their solution, which is to grow a collection of low-quality public-domain content from the ground up, isn't the optimal one or even a good one, but in the face of corporate near-control of the political process required to "liberate" older works from the copyright system, it's something publishers should have predicted before they started demanding the extensions. (Of course, that would have required long-term thinking.)

In reality, it seems to be a case of a few large 'n' greedy megacorps (Disney and Time-Warner, for example) holding everything else hostage because of their demands to control everything they currently hold in near-perpetuity, and publishers like the Encyclopedia Britannica just coming along for the ride.

I doubt it's as significant an effect on the intelligence of the general public as, say, the anesthetization of people by a constant barrage of trivialized and sensationalized TV and other mass-media... But if we grant the possibility that much of the user-generated content we're concerned with here (not just Wikipedia) wouldn't have been necessary to set up in the first place if copyrights weren't being blanket-extended to ridiculous lengths, then it's probably worth mentioning, IMO.

I remember discussing this with a mentor of mine once. He had written a book on politics in the mid-1980s, when he was in his late 40s. When I knew him he was in his 60s and the book, like most books by academics, had been out of print for several years. I found it amazing that assuming he lived to be 80, the book would not enter the public domain until I was ~110. So, basically a book published when I was something like 7 years old and that went out of print when I was 11, would be foreclosed to further reproduction or use outside of large research libraries until after my children were dead. Something there doesn't make sense to me. Are we actually saying authors would write less or in some way be harmed if their great-great grandchildren can't get a penny of royalties?

The folks that write the copyright laws are also Satan's sockpuppets. You cannot win either way.

And he did a better job on patents.

Two horrible ironies here.

1. The field of academic publishing does not depend on remuneration. You do not get paid for publishing an article in a journal. Your reward is the prestige. About 1 in 10 of articles submitted to prestige journals get published, and appearing in print is the benefit. Similarly for those who work as editors, do peer review, work on advisory boards and so on. I peer review for a number of publications and there is no reward at all, except for the networking benefit from those you are doing a favour to.

A similar principle applies to books. These are published expensively, and circulate mostly to university libraries, which effectively subsidise the industry.

Thus if anything is ripe for 'open source', it is academic publishing. The irony is that it is the least open of all publication forms. Particularly in my area (13th century medieval logic) where the main skill is simply getting hold of source material. This is often in the form of manuscripts, which are (a) in a foreign language, Latin (b) are unreadable except to those trained in the peculiar form of writing used © are hard to obtain - every new source I discover involves protracted arguing and bureaucracy with the libraries that hold the manuscripts, who are exceptionally impervious to the idea of publishing on the web.

2. The field popular culture, by contrast, depends on individuals from mostly poor backgrounds playing the lottery card to become famous for their talent and mass entertainment value. Their main motivation is the financial reward. They deserve it: they enrich our lives and history with their art, even if it is slight when compared to the total history of human civilisation.

The irony here is that this field suffers most from the 'free culture' movement, as we know.

I believe that is the position held by Mark Helprin in his now-infamous New York Times editorial .

Randroids love him.


What, then, would be a "good" solution?

This exposes the Randoid libertarian right to be about what the rest of the right is about, the maintenance of privilege. Otherwise they would be concerned about the disconnect this creates between creativity and reward. The idle and parasitic heirs shouldn't benefit under any system that actual is concerned about rewarding creation. In practice the linkage between reward and creation is better advanced by liberals, and even more so by socialists.

Whatever the length of protection of IP is, it's completely ridiculous that it's not the same for patents as for copyright. And yes, copyright is ridiculously long, and Disney has much to do with it. Mickey Mouse won't be public domain until a century after his creation, and this was done ex post facto, by congressional mandate in the Bono law, funded by Disney and others.

I would propose that all IP, copyright OR patent, be protected for 50 years, or author's lifetime, whichever is longer. That prevents authors from outliving their work. But 50 years minimum is enough that no author will die tragically and young, and be prevented from leaving his/her IP to underage children. 50 years is also plenty for corporate IP, also. And this would give a nice boost to patents, which would become 2.5 times as valuable (they've certainly become more than 2.5 times as expensive to file! Compare with copyright, which costs nothing). The boon to basic scientific and technical research and funding for same, is hard to quantify, but would be gigantic.

Alas, there are not many inventors who are lawmakers. I think Abe Lincoln remains our only president to be issued a patent, and he never made any money on it. Compare with the millions and millions the last couple of generations of presidents have made from their memoirs. Congress is mostly composed of lawyers, but not patent lawyers.

If you mean a non-transferable copyright term of (for example) life plus zero would be fairer than the status quo, I'd definitely agree with that.

However sometimes worrying about the authors' offspring is not enough; there may also be the offspring of their creations as decided in Pioneer v. J.E.M., Monsanto v. Scruggs, etc., milestones at which only the most hard-core capitalist spectators can doubt that "intellectual property" case-law has jumped the shark.

Wow, that was awful. Has he ever talked with anyone who disagrees with him?

How about instead of focusing everything on how to give descendants control over things they didn't do, control that could never even exist without it artificially being provided, we focus on getting society to learn from the past? Copyright law is such a non-priority to the average person, it's always struck me as one of the most corrupt areas of U.S. law.

(Not to go too off topic. I think a lot of people were stupid before the web, and will remain stupid afterward, perhaps just in different ways. This discussion was making me think a little of what it is really that people should be learning in an ideal world... I'm not sure I agree with Somey that remembering facts is especially important. Actually I would probably put more importance on the amount or level of information a person encounters, in such a way as may challenge their preconceptions, or spark their interests to look further. At least to a degree, but that is a point that critics/commentators on Wikipedia might consider.)

In theory Randroids don't have any problem transferring money to heirs. Or to your favorite cause. You just put this down as financing your own "values." That idea is an overall safety valve which allows Randroids to do the standard "gene-pool and offspring conserving" acts, like nursing their offspring. Note that Rand never had any children, so, like a nun, her brain remained unchanged by all those mechanisms that flip over in the female (and to some extent male) brain when they become parents. "It's official-- I've become my own mother" is funny only because there's a lot of truth in it.

I've seen raging hippy liberals because conservative about a lot of things (drugs, sex) when they reproduce, and I've also seen raging conservatives become liberal about a lot of things, so long as it involves kin (there's nothing more communist or socialist about the value-transfers that happen within a family, and Rand had to deal with that philosophically even if she never had much feeling for it).

Unless people think that part of their reward is ensuring that their wife and children are provided for. Also, do you propose confiscating his entire estate when he dies to stop his idle and parasitic widow and childen benefiting from that too?

Then he should invest the profits made from it during the [shorter] copyright period.

Also, do you propose continuing to pay someone's salary forever in order to provide for their children (and their children, and their children, to the Nth level)?

Somebody's got a trust fund, huh?

Invest the profits? So his parasitical relatives may benefit? No, confiscate his estate!

And any decent pension scheme will certainly carry on paying out to dependants after the pensioner dies, though admittedly not forever. Let's stop widow's and orphans' pensions.

Trust funds come in handy when internet addiction interferes with employment.

There's something odd, really, about extending a copyright well after the author's death. Defamation isn't like that. Once someone dies, you can say whatever you want about them. But if you want to read their book, then you better pay whoever it is they picked to get the royalties.

If they realized there was something perverse about it I wouldn't so much mind. I wouldn't cut if off right at the author's death, but life plus 70? That's nuts.


I wonder if longer copyright terms are a good way to help the disprivileged.

It wouldn't have to necessarily end at death in all cases to be made much fairer. As much fun as yanking the chains of people benefiting from unearned wealth, life or at least 20 years from creation would pretty much take care of those "widows and orphans." Remember this libertarian scheme would have the remote heirs of Shakespeare and Cervantes receiving a endless dole.

I think it makes much more sense to make copyrights more like patents and simply have them last a fixed term - 20 years isn't a bad length of time. A big plus, naturally, is the simplicity of such a system, you don't need to look up when someone died (information that may be essentially unavailable) to determine whether or not the copyright is current. Furthermore, a fixed term gives stability and peace of mind to publishers (who would be in quite a bind under a life + 0 scheme should, say, John Grishman tragically die the day before his next big book is to launch). It just makes sense.

Wow, I swear this article was freely visible until yesterday. Guess I forgot to use web-cite.

This has happened before with NYT articles I have cited on Wikipedia, one of which was public domain (being published in 1921).

While coincidence cannot explain my generally poor experiences with the NYT web-site, I don't suppose I could convince more folks to kindly disable the http-referer header in their browsers? That might help.

Why do ultra-self-proclaimed "libertarians" prefer longer copyright terms? Copyright is an invention of the state; it's essentially a government restriction on commerce and free enterprise intended to benefit society as a whole (innovation, artistry, etc.). Having the government regulate the right to copy isn't all that different from regulating financial markets, or even regulating healthcare. Any ultra-dogmatic small-government libertarian type should be against copyright entirely.

But as they say, "socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else."

That link worked for me. However, in general, news sites are awful when it comes to link-rot (with the NYT site being much better than most, in my experience). One of the big pains-in-the-butt of the Web is when digging through old blog and forum entries, where they refer to a news article and comment on it, and almost invariably if it's more than a few months old the link is broken. The newspaper and magazine sites seem to think their business model depends on keeping their online content ephemeral.

I never said anything about internet addiction. But this is a typical lawyer's response. Don't let parasitical widows and orphans benefit from their husband's/father's hard work unless they've paid a parasitical lawyer a large sum to set up a trust fund.

I haven't been able to figure that one out either. Equally interesting are my observations about the way the strength of various countries' copyright laws (and enforcement thereof) corresponds to the so-called "economic freedom index".

Perhaps the latter is defined (at least in part) as freedom from competition, i.e. the number of ways not only to make money, but to make exclusive money, even post-humous money. At least, as of 2009, one cannot "copyright" or "patent" general business models/strategies (though courts have recently upheld stranger things).

Or it could just be a coincidence.


Perhaps I misjudged as it seems to load once more. However I swear I clicked the link I posted above, just to see if the author seemed any saner than before, and was confronted by the log-in screen.

So I rolled my eyes saying "not this shit again" and began complaining about it (as y'all know I'm wont to do when things don't go my way ).

Yeah, it's almost as if they don't want Wikipedia or any other please-don't-take-our-word-for-it reference work to cite them as a source.

No, actually for the most part they probably believe fewer than one in a thousand readers are interested in anything older than two weeks (and that those who are will also pay the cost of a square meal to see it).

This is a toughie. Yes, it benefits society as a whole, but the original idea of copyright is that it's a trade (something like a treaty-- you see this most clearly in international IP agreements). The essential idea is that if the inventor will set down VERY CLEARLY the best recipe for how to make X, then IN RETURN, society will grant a limited licence to the inventor so that other people must pay to use that recipe, and can't just copy it. With the understanding that the terms of the license are limited, so that X becomes public domain after a time. Here society benefits from the limited licence time.

What happens without such a bargain? Well, inventors stop inventing because there's no payoff in it (this does happen-- ask how I know). The other thing is that inventors who keep inventing in countries without strong IP laws, resort to various subterfuges to keep their IP safe, including making their inventions overly complicated with many features which are unnecessary but which make the thing harder to reverse-engineer. Encrypted spaghetti-code being an example, but there are many others. Other features are kept in the back room as black-art, and never released, so that society is still paying a premium a century later-- maybe longer if the invention is a non-obvious one which is hard to reverse-engineer (these do exist: some chemical reactions happen only in a certain sequence and certain conditions, and the products leave NO trace of what happened during their assembly). So it's a devil's bargain, but ultimately both inventors and society benefit.

Right now I think it's biased against inventors, which is why we have gone to the moon but our idea of medical innovation is: drug A and drug B, NOW IN THE SAME PILL FOR THE FIRST TIME!!! ZOMG. A genuinely new drug class can be ripped off far too easily by adding a small modification somewhere (the patent cannot cover them all, and cannot be written in terms of effect or drug-action), and the first drug of a new class is hardly ever the best drug in that class that will ever be found, and the me-too drugs result in the screwing of the first inventor(s) and their backers (troglitazone as an example, but there are many others where the original drug remains on-formulary, but me-too drugs outsell it). Interestingly, the DEA laws which cover "designer drugs" (which really DO cover effect) are far better at catching ripoffs of already-illegal molecules, than the copyright law which applies to legal drugs. It's not that the job can't be done-- it's that the goverment only cares when it comes to modifying illegal drugs, but not when it comes to modifying legal ones. A fact I recommend to those who think "big-pharma" controls government drug policy.

Anarchists and libertarians have not really come to grips with IP law. Most of them would be outraged if their own works were copyright infringed. As for "Objectivists," they probably would be in favor of patents, since they do see a role for government in preventing "theft." However, Ayn Rand has Galt protect his secret generator with a GREAT BIG PADLOCK which reminds me of the original Superman Fortress of Solitude (Neitzche joke suppressed). The "government" of Galt's Gulch is not involved. It never occurs to Rand that anybody can make "Rearden Metal" without Hank Rearden, once it's marketted. And Rand's composers give concerts in guarded halls, and apparently don't sell records (and tiny recording devices are discounted). Basically, Rand didn't really provide any answers, except that she was sure she didn't want her own copyrights violated. Typical.

Meanwhile people are dying and GSK thinks 40% is "reasonable".

Those of you who find the above just a bit TL;DR, here's the slimmy on Randroid Moider Most Fowl —


At least it doesn't violate the wiki-proscription against against Original Religion.

Jon

Well, what is a reasonable royalty fee? Yes the traditional one hovers around 4%, but thats' for licencing a drug to a country for internal manufacture and sales, not for it to mass produce it for export, which results in your market for the drug all around the world being destroyed.

Yes, people die for lack of drugs. They also die (taking the long view) from lack of drug development. If you want to eat the seed corn, so to speak, make new drug development unprofitable (as it is now for many antibiotics and short term use drugs, and also for orphan drugs for rare diseases).

Like virtually everything else, this is an area where society's interest is best served by a moderate, balanced position. However, of late our tendency has been to allow public discourse to be dominated by the spectral extremes. When you let this happen, you usually end up with the position favored by whichever extreme group can shout the loudest. Which suits them just great, and everyone else not well at all.

Finally !

Someone actually returns to the Original Topic !!

This may be an event that borders on a historical first !!!

Callooh! Callay! O frabjous day!

Jon

Writes Jon, in a typically ornimental and allusive message departing massively from the original topic.

Edit: Oops, logged in with the wrong account.