To talk about the meta issue for a second—the reaction to Matt's shit-stirring—I've been really dismayed at how many people are *certain* that shortening copyright terms is heartless, doesn't want creatives to get paid, etc. I'm almost 40 and all throughout the early 2000s it was widely talked about how regressive long copyrights were, how they made it impossible for, say, documentary filmmakers who want to include music that was playing in the background when they shot their footage, etc. And yet not only was shortening copyright attacked by someone like N.K. Jemisin—who published her first book in 2010 so maybe just didn't have to give the subject much thought before then—but by David Simon, who was making books and TV shows well before the Mickey Mouse Act and whose works are all about how systems get manipulated by the rich and powerful at the expense of the little guy! Status quo bias is just such a bummer, because it drives home how hard it is to make change even among people who consider themselves progressive.
I mean it still is widely talked about. And by most accounts thanks to all that work the politics of doing further extensions has gotten much more difficult. Unfortunately on Twitter you have lots of people who have no idea what they're talking about mouthing-off without even doing cursory research.
Yeah, but it's also not like their opinions are being randomly sorted—a lot of people reflexively come down in favor of a) whatever the current system is, and/or b) whatever benefits them. And since their identity is progressive, intellectual, etc., then they rationalize that as the progressive, intellectual position. You see it with housing, with all sorts of issues.
Yes, to me that's actually the most annoying thing — it's one thing to advocate for the status quo; it's another thing entirely to insist that your pro status quo politics are progressive!
I think there's also a lot of people who think that life+70 is much too long and 30 is too short. For instance, one of your interlocutors was John Scalzi who said, in that very conversation, "I myself would trim it back a bit to life+25"
There are clearly a large number of midlist authors who will be badly affected. Having chatted with several, they publish 1-2 new novels a year and get an advance for each of them, but also get a steady trickle of royalties from their entire backlist (which ebooks and print on demand make a lot easier to keep in print). A few hundred dollars a year per book adds up after 30-40 years to a pretty decent addition to Social Security, but cutting that off at the 30 year mark will cost a lot of them their ability to live in comfort in retirement.
I don't like a system that is mostly from date of publication because I've seen what a mess it was when part of Sherlock Holmes was in copyright and part was not - several key features of Holmes were in the later works and unlicensed adaptations had to write around them, which was awful. I think we can address the "author dies young" issue by using a suitable birthday. My suggestion is that copyright should run to the author's 110th birthday, so it would enter the public domain at 111. I could settle for "or ten years after publication whichever is later" if you don't want very long-lived authors to go straight into the public domain.
My understanding is that birth records were inadequate in the 1860s for a birth-based period, where death records for well-known authors were fine for a death-based period.
I find it hard to believe that mid tier authors make much more than a small trickle of income from 30+ year old books. That small income goes up against the enormous social benefits of having a huge public domain for new artists to build on top of and for the public to enjoy. If we are worried about artists (and we should be) it is vastly more efficient to give more funding to them directly instead of using a ridiculous monopoly system that mostly benefits huge corporations.
Scalzi might be an exception to that: he's extremely successful by the standards of his field, and he's got a reasonably large and still evangelical fanbase...
...but he's also a good example of why this is such an insane debate. Scalzi will retire comfortably because he optioned the Old Man's War series to Netflix for a bajillion dollars, not because the book royalties from OMW will be a 5% supplement to his social security income. That was going to be his exit whether the term of copyright is 30 or 300 years: film studios want _recognizable properties_. They will not start preferring forgotten 30 year old just-off-copyright works just because the option costs are lower: even a 7-figure deal like scalzi's is a rounding error on the budget of a prestige TV series or a feature film.
And even the relative popularity of Scalzi's works now is no guarantee. Norman Spinrad was 5X as famous as Scalzi in relative terms in his prime (which was, well, a little over 30 years ago), and if _Bug Jack Barron_ or _The Iron Dream_ have taken in more than $50 in royalties in 2020 I'll eat my hat. Anyone with a bookscan login who wants to make me eat my hat is welcome to correct me!
(Everyone else who's scratching their head and saying "Norman who? The Iron What?" please get thee to amazon and get those two books on Kindle: Spinrad self-publishes them there now that they're out of print.)
Scalzi's pieces on this (https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/03/07/two-tweet-threads-about-copyright/) are worth reading as a centrist creator's PoV. One thing he does bring up is that that development of a TV series takes 10 years (or something like that), and won't usually be considered until the books have been successful for a while. So essentially a TV spinoff would usually only come out after 15-20 years. If copyright terms were in that ballpark, virtually no author (other than JK Rowling?) would ever get TV or film royalties because the studios would just wait them out.
The nice thing about the status quo being a complete obscenity is that nearly anything would be an improvement: if pegging the term of copyright at 50 years would get more people on-side, I'd be happy with that.
But I'm also dubious that he's correct. If the cost or speed of licensing the property were the limiting factor here, there's no lack whatsoever of 30-50 year old scifi properties that were popular in their day but are completely forgotten now where the authors would be ecstatic to sign the rights over for $100,000 on the table tomorrow. (Bug Jack Barron, passim...) The value of a property like Old Man's War for a studio is that it has present-day name recognition and thus a built-in audience _now_.
Also (and this is separate, hence a separate comment, a lot of the time people have done research, they just didn't put it in the tweet. It's not like you put all of your context in the tweet either, you just said "thirty years" seemingly off the cuff.
Twitter is very good at decontextualising everything and then people assume it's being said without context or understanding and people who are relatively intelligent and knowledgeable get angry at each other even though their underlying disagreements are much smaller than you'd think.
Maybe this is too much of a stretch but I feel like part of the shift of the past 10 years of Democrats becoming the party of more educated people is that people on the left are much too deferential to obviously terrible arguments coming from rent-seeking stakeholders who work in a particular area so have the sheen of "expertise." There used to be a bit more of a healthy skepticism for these arguments, and Democrats used to be more explicitly in favor of things that would help everybody as opposed to simply sympathetic cases within the industry. I could be totally off on this, but it feels true and it really seems to apply here.
You also see a weird posturing in some educated circles where being a professional is seen as more pro-social than being in business (see: people wanting to be lawyers and doctors to "make a difference"). Professional artists are also positioned as the value creators vs the business side of art who are argued to be rapacious vampire squid parasites (see all the artists saying faceless corporations will benefit from looser IP at the expense of artists).
As someone who came up just after sampling litigation tore a hole through hip-hop, it is wild to me to think that young artists (who will be disproportionately be of colour because young people are disproportionately of colour!) wouldn't be the main beneficiaries of looser copyright laws.
I think a lot of it is the advent of what Matt has called "Lawyer brain" where a lot of people posit that a rule-following disposition is inherently virtuous. Generally following the rules is good, but also there is the to mix in some shit-stirring because it is true that the rich and powerful generally make the rules for their own benefit. The posts I've seen about copyright shows a lot of people who are self-interested in long copyright terms, being supported by people who basically just think rules are good.
In my experience private-sector lawyers generally don't have that delusion--they work for corporations and wealthy or middle-class individuals all day and realize they're just a service industry. But students going to law school vastly underestimate how many of them will become private-sector lawyers. There really aren't many jobs for public interest law or in government and those jobs are often (a) hard to get and (b) strongly prefer hiring people with private-sector experience, so virtually everyone works in firms for corporations at some point.
I am something of a veteran of talking to authors about things that they don't like, and the thing to remember about authors of novels etc is: there is no reason to believe that they are particularly smart, well informed about policy, intellectually rigorous in their imported philosophy, or generally worth listening to about politics at all.
They do tend to be reasonable eloquent, which can obscure other lacks, because that's their professional skill! But in general the ones I interacted with had rather venal opinions informed by a narrow sense of what was in their interests as authors, that I think they tended to pick up organically from the culture of other authors.
On twitter N.K. Jemisin offhandedly endorsed the idea of "Life plus 15 or 30" although I think the idea of "30 years or life, whichever is longer" is better and I'm guessing she would agree with a proposition like that.
N.K. Jemisin brought up some good points saying that copyrights that don't last for a lifetime would end up reducing the income of an author when they might need that income the most, when they're elderly. Artists aren't known for a proclivity to save up retirement accounts, so I think she has a fair point pushing back on the 28 years idea.
She was just reacting negatively to the idea of ending copyright before the death of the creator, but Jemisin and Yglesias came to basically the same conclusion.
The initial reaction by artists is going to be bad, but I think this kind of change could get broader buy-in from the artistic community.
> would end up reducing the income of an author when they might need that income the most
This is a really bad argument for an artificial monopoly for a particular industry (i.e. copyright). It's a really good argument for improving our social safety nets (and, arguably, financial literacy and access).
There was in fact a legal challenge by the Holmes estate over Enola Holmes. The earliest Holmes stories are in the public domain but not the latest ones. The estate said that since Enola Holmes portrayed Sherlock as empathetic, a trait Conan Doyle added later in the series, then any empathetic emotions by Sherlock in Enola Holmes was a copyright violation. It appears this was settled by Netflix out of court. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes
As a fellow veteran of the 1998 copyright wars, I cannot express how goddamn dispiriting it is to see the entire debate replayed in The Discourse at twitter speed, and to watch otherwise intelligent young people to not only take what would have been, circa-1998, considered reducto-ad-absurdem bad faith caricatures of the copyright maximalist position, but to describe them not even as a _position_ (ie: one of multiple possible competing alternatives) but as some sort of statement of natural law.
The bad guys won the copyright argument, and now we live in a world where it seems to be absurd to even consider an alternative approach. And statistically every last one of these idiots stumping for eternal copyright protection will have spent $100 or more in the last year (well, maybe not 2020) on entertainments that exist because of corporations using copyright law to commit wholesale larceny against a small group of prewar Jewish comic book authors, or on a form of music (hip-hop) that would never have been allowed to _exist_ had our current copyright regime been in place in 1975.
(Belated postscript: a specific shout-out of disappointment to N.K. Jemisin, who's "The City We Became" is completely and correctly invested in the cultural centrality of hip-hop to NYC that the 1998 copyright act was in part designed to make impossible to recur.)
Seeing so many (very successful) authors so blatantly trying to make The Progressive Take the one that exactly served their obvious self-interests to response to your tweet would have been hilarious if they weren't so successful in doing so. Progressivism means protecting the wealth-generation abilities of Walt Disney, famously-racist old dead guy, for the Walt Disney Company ($DIS)! Boggles the mind. Beyond that, the last time I remember seeing that crowd get mad was at the Internet Archive, possible the most selfless organization on the internet, for having the gall to freely loan scanned copies of old books during the early days of the pandemic. Heroic acts of punching down like that make me wish we had a proper Pirate Party like they do in the Europe.
I think the worse was I saw James Poniewozik, the TV critic for the Times, piously talking about the rights of creators. Does he remember that Mad Men had to shell out $250 grand for a Beatles song? Does he think maybe other shows with smaller budgets might want to use Beatles songs now and then?
I just re-watched the entire series. Great stuff. On one of the episode closes (season 4 IIRC) they rolled into the credits with the Muzak version of a Beatles song, presumably for the reasons being discussed here. I shudder to think about the body blow society would have received had Matthew Weiner been able to get away with using the Beatles recording.
There's a brilliant British TV programme that talks about how to make...erm television programmes. It has a funny bit where the presenter notes that as its the BBC they can play whatever they want without having to pay, due to a sweetheart deal the BBC has with the record industry. So he plays a bit of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He then says he cannot show us the album cover, because as a copyrighted piece of art, that would cost the show thousands of pounds to show unless they were reviewing/critiquing it.
People love agreeing with their favorite authors and creators on Twitter because it feels like a sort of relationship. And once you've retweeted that author, you're locked into the position to some extent, so the ability to really absorb the counter-arguments (from, I don't know, an up-and-coming rapper or someone) is greatly reduced.
I'm just glad to see that scandals now get the "-ghazi" treatment instead of the "-gate" attachment. Gate had become stale and predictable, stifling the creativity of the country. This is progress.
A decade ago on the internet, this would have been the majority take, completely uncontroversial. I’m shocked at how much that’s changed. I had a quasi-prominent author on Twitter accuse me of wanting writers to be unable to eat just because I suggested that maybe “Life + 70” was a little bit too long! It’s wild.
I actually don’t know what a standard publishing contract is like—if I sell a book to a publisher, do they typically retain the copyright for its entire term? If so, I guess I would be selling the future revenue stream during my lifetime. (Still is too long though. Especially because 95%+ of copyrighted things won’t still be making money after its author has been dead for 70 years.)
Much like every poor american is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, every mid-shelf-or-lower author on twitter is a temporarily embarrassed JK Rowling.
As someone who remembers the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, when Congress ripped 20 years of public domain away at the behest of corporate lobbyist, I am left with a lifelong disgust for copyright maximalist and would be happy to revert it to 28 years with registration required.
No one has ever explained why granting 20 years of extended copyright retroactively promotes people to be creative. I'm no expert on entropy, but since we remember the past and not the future, it seems to me that extending copyright in 1998 to works written before 1998 does nothing but shaft the public.
I mean, from when I was 19 to 39 literally not a damn thing entered the public domain.
Copyright is a government-created, government-regulated monopoly. Government sets the cost (duration), and the public pays the price. As such, the cost should be as low as possible but just high enough to get the job done.
Its like when the government would offer a bounty for anyone to do a job. As long as someone does the job, there is no reason to set the bounty higher.
Mark Twain wrote most of his novels under a 42 year copyright. He made a lot of money with a 42 year term. And he is considered a great american author and his works are some of the greatest american novels. Clearly 42 year terms was enough to entice great authors to write great works.
A more in depth examination of the copyright as bounty here. Click on the html link to read for free.
Side note: Mein Kampf indeed was under copyright (German law is death plus 70 years) until fairly recently, held by the Bavarian state which banned all publications - severely hampering the publication of new historic commentary on the complete work in Germany.
According to the founders, copyright law exists only as an incentive to get the work created. It was not created because the founders felt that authors have a natural right to be remunerated for the work out of some sense of fairness. So we're basically just talking about a utilitarian "trade" between creators and society. That's it. No duty to creators. No need for the system to be "fair" to creators.
So that brings us to the question of how much of an incentive is needed to get creators and inventors to do their thing. For this, we can draw from a tool from finance called Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis.
This tried and true financial tool is widely used by investors to decide whether it's wise to invest some amount of dollars today in return for some series of risky returns to be received in the future. The trick with DCF is that dollars received after 25 or 30 years have almost zero value today because they are so heavily discounted by uncertainty of time.
In other words, if you're thinking about writing a book and deciding whether it's worth it, you'll weigh the dollars you'd earn for the first 10-20 years very heavily in your decision, but will almost completely discount or ignore the possibility of earning dollars after 20 years. Potential earnings that are so far away and uncertain wouldn't factor at all into your decision to write a book or do something else with your time.
To me, this is the most compelling reason to limit copyright law to a timeframe in the 20-30 year range. This preserves 99% of the incentive to create great works while giving the public the benefit of any bonus residual value that remains after the term expires.
Yes, but the term depends substantially on the discount rate. Right now the "real" interest rate (not counting inflation because you assume that the price you get for something in the future will increase with inflation) is negative.
I get your point overall, but I don't think it'd be appropriate to use a negative discount rate in most cases. While it's true that nowadays real financing costs for capital projects can be negative, generally, for broader investment decisions that have varying levels of riskiness, most would say the appropriate discount rate to use is one that's based on the riskiness of the future cash flows, not on an average cost of finance.
This is especially true when you're using DCF to decide between alternative investments of varying riskiness.
For example, the stream of cash flows from a utility scale solar project where the regulatory environment is stable and most of the plant's output is presold with power purchase agreements is a lot less risky than the cash flow stream from an investment in a small modular nuclear reactor project. Under normal market conditions, you wouldn't use the same discount rate for these two projects.
(as an aside, to your original point, one of the main reasons utility scale solar costs have plummeted recently is that finance costs for these projects plummeted as investors became so comfortable with their risk profiles). Investor estimates of the riskiness of the future cash flows from these projects dropped markedly as they got more experience with them and that meant all of a sudden the projects could attract financing at super cheap rates.)
Yes, my point was that you can't use a negative discount rate because the NPV would be infinite and the valuation of returns far in the future would be increasing, not diminishing. All of the considerations that you are describing are specific to the risks of the project (and risk tolerance for the investor) but to justify copyright term on the basis of discounting, aren't you requiring the same discount rate for everything subject to copyright?
>> ...but to justify copyright term on the basis of discounting, aren't you requiring the same discount rate for everything subject to copyright?
The short answer is yes. But in truth the exact discount rate doesn't matter very much once you get out to 30 years. Keep in mind there are two things going on as the time horizon expands. First, an increasing proportion of the total expected future revenue stream is captured as the term expands. Second, the discounting impact becomes greater and greater on that smaller and smaller part that's left behind.
At 30 years out, the cash flows become extremely uncertain and I'd posit a discount rate in the 10-15% range would be the minimum called for. At a 10% discount rate, the present value of a dollar in 30 years is $0.06. At 15%, that dollar is only worth $0.01.
That's where my claim came from that at almost any sane discount rate, 30 years let's creators capture 99% of the value of their work in present value adjusted dollars. The added incentive to creators for a longer term of 50 years or 70 years is basically nil.
I think your argument is becoming circular. Because we don’t know what will happen 30 years out, there’s little point in caring about it so we assign it a high discount rate so it doesn’t matter.
I also think you’re double counting. You don’t set a discount rate of 10-15% for each year up to thirty years. The large discount at thirty years is the result of compounding of a lower rate over the 30 years
Imagine the uproar if Congress tried to retroactively extend patent protection for pharmaceuticals, like it did with copyright. I don't recall the details but there were some challenges to the constitutionality of retroactive extensions of IP, since heaping more rewards on an already-created work doesn't promote progress of science or arts.
I'm a classical musician, and in our world, it is still very much the common belief that copyright law is crazy and creativity-stifling, and everyone despises Disney and Sonny Bono.
Music publishers are absolutely horrible companies that only exist because of their monopoly interests. They charge outrageous fees for performances of works within copyright and this adds to the problem of our art form being viewed as stodgy, old, and white.
Let's say you're a start-up chamber orchestra and you want to program a piece by a living Latina composer, but her publisher is going to charge you $800 / performance. You might not expect to break even on that. If you could, instead, program a Mozart symphony which is FREE, it's easy to see why people default to the canon.
Why limit it to intellectual property? IIRC in Singapore almost all the real estate is owned by the government and citizens can purchase 99 year leases. In a sense real property is treated like intellectual property in that ownership of both has a finite life.
This is kind of how a land value tax works. The government effectively owns the land and "rents" it out to the owners for a certain periodical payment based on how valuable it is. Check out Georgism.
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the Land to the People!
All joking aside, LVT is a great idea, especially on the local level. (Dunno if I'd call it a great idea to be the *only* tax like many Georgists claimed, but whatever.) The current system of real estate tax--taxing improved value in addition to the raw land value--creates all kinds of weird perverse incentives that measurably makes life worse for people. There was a good Weeds on it in April-May 2016 (the shownotes are here: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/2/11533936/the-weeds-land-value-tax-explained).
Still the official party song of the (British) Liberal Democrats. It's quite a lot of fun to sing as an anthem (ie a large group of amateurs singing in unison).
To talk about the meta issue for a second—the reaction to Matt's shit-stirring—I've been really dismayed at how many people are *certain* that shortening copyright terms is heartless, doesn't want creatives to get paid, etc. I'm almost 40 and all throughout the early 2000s it was widely talked about how regressive long copyrights were, how they made it impossible for, say, documentary filmmakers who want to include music that was playing in the background when they shot their footage, etc. And yet not only was shortening copyright attacked by someone like N.K. Jemisin—who published her first book in 2010 so maybe just didn't have to give the subject much thought before then—but by David Simon, who was making books and TV shows well before the Mickey Mouse Act and whose works are all about how systems get manipulated by the rich and powerful at the expense of the little guy! Status quo bias is just such a bummer, because it drives home how hard it is to make change even among people who consider themselves progressive.
I mean it still is widely talked about. And by most accounts thanks to all that work the politics of doing further extensions has gotten much more difficult. Unfortunately on Twitter you have lots of people who have no idea what they're talking about mouthing-off without even doing cursory research.
Yeah, but it's also not like their opinions are being randomly sorted—a lot of people reflexively come down in favor of a) whatever the current system is, and/or b) whatever benefits them. And since their identity is progressive, intellectual, etc., then they rationalize that as the progressive, intellectual position. You see it with housing, with all sorts of issues.
Yes, to me that's actually the most annoying thing — it's one thing to advocate for the status quo; it's another thing entirely to insist that your pro status quo politics are progressive!
I think there's also a lot of people who think that life+70 is much too long and 30 is too short. For instance, one of your interlocutors was John Scalzi who said, in that very conversation, "I myself would trim it back a bit to life+25"
There are clearly a large number of midlist authors who will be badly affected. Having chatted with several, they publish 1-2 new novels a year and get an advance for each of them, but also get a steady trickle of royalties from their entire backlist (which ebooks and print on demand make a lot easier to keep in print). A few hundred dollars a year per book adds up after 30-40 years to a pretty decent addition to Social Security, but cutting that off at the 30 year mark will cost a lot of them their ability to live in comfort in retirement.
I don't like a system that is mostly from date of publication because I've seen what a mess it was when part of Sherlock Holmes was in copyright and part was not - several key features of Holmes were in the later works and unlicensed adaptations had to write around them, which was awful. I think we can address the "author dies young" issue by using a suitable birthday. My suggestion is that copyright should run to the author's 110th birthday, so it would enter the public domain at 111. I could settle for "or ten years after publication whichever is later" if you don't want very long-lived authors to go straight into the public domain.
My understanding is that birth records were inadequate in the 1860s for a birth-based period, where death records for well-known authors were fine for a death-based period.
I find it hard to believe that mid tier authors make much more than a small trickle of income from 30+ year old books. That small income goes up against the enormous social benefits of having a huge public domain for new artists to build on top of and for the public to enjoy. If we are worried about artists (and we should be) it is vastly more efficient to give more funding to them directly instead of using a ridiculous monopoly system that mostly benefits huge corporations.
Scalzi might be an exception to that: he's extremely successful by the standards of his field, and he's got a reasonably large and still evangelical fanbase...
...but he's also a good example of why this is such an insane debate. Scalzi will retire comfortably because he optioned the Old Man's War series to Netflix for a bajillion dollars, not because the book royalties from OMW will be a 5% supplement to his social security income. That was going to be his exit whether the term of copyright is 30 or 300 years: film studios want _recognizable properties_. They will not start preferring forgotten 30 year old just-off-copyright works just because the option costs are lower: even a 7-figure deal like scalzi's is a rounding error on the budget of a prestige TV series or a feature film.
And even the relative popularity of Scalzi's works now is no guarantee. Norman Spinrad was 5X as famous as Scalzi in relative terms in his prime (which was, well, a little over 30 years ago), and if _Bug Jack Barron_ or _The Iron Dream_ have taken in more than $50 in royalties in 2020 I'll eat my hat. Anyone with a bookscan login who wants to make me eat my hat is welcome to correct me!
(Everyone else who's scratching their head and saying "Norman who? The Iron What?" please get thee to amazon and get those two books on Kindle: Spinrad self-publishes them there now that they're out of print.)
Scalzi's pieces on this (https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/03/07/two-tweet-threads-about-copyright/) are worth reading as a centrist creator's PoV. One thing he does bring up is that that development of a TV series takes 10 years (or something like that), and won't usually be considered until the books have been successful for a while. So essentially a TV spinoff would usually only come out after 15-20 years. If copyright terms were in that ballpark, virtually no author (other than JK Rowling?) would ever get TV or film royalties because the studios would just wait them out.
The nice thing about the status quo being a complete obscenity is that nearly anything would be an improvement: if pegging the term of copyright at 50 years would get more people on-side, I'd be happy with that.
But I'm also dubious that he's correct. If the cost or speed of licensing the property were the limiting factor here, there's no lack whatsoever of 30-50 year old scifi properties that were popular in their day but are completely forgotten now where the authors would be ecstatic to sign the rights over for $100,000 on the table tomorrow. (Bug Jack Barron, passim...) The value of a property like Old Man's War for a studio is that it has present-day name recognition and thus a built-in audience _now_.
Is Scalzi a centrist? I would've pegged him as a Warren-voter type.
Also (and this is separate, hence a separate comment, a lot of the time people have done research, they just didn't put it in the tweet. It's not like you put all of your context in the tweet either, you just said "thirty years" seemingly off the cuff.
Twitter is very good at decontextualising everything and then people assume it's being said without context or understanding and people who are relatively intelligent and knowledgeable get angry at each other even though their underlying disagreements are much smaller than you'd think.
Maybe this is too much of a stretch but I feel like part of the shift of the past 10 years of Democrats becoming the party of more educated people is that people on the left are much too deferential to obviously terrible arguments coming from rent-seeking stakeholders who work in a particular area so have the sheen of "expertise." There used to be a bit more of a healthy skepticism for these arguments, and Democrats used to be more explicitly in favor of things that would help everybody as opposed to simply sympathetic cases within the industry. I could be totally off on this, but it feels true and it really seems to apply here.
You also see a weird posturing in some educated circles where being a professional is seen as more pro-social than being in business (see: people wanting to be lawyers and doctors to "make a difference"). Professional artists are also positioned as the value creators vs the business side of art who are argued to be rapacious vampire squid parasites (see all the artists saying faceless corporations will benefit from looser IP at the expense of artists).
As someone who came up just after sampling litigation tore a hole through hip-hop, it is wild to me to think that young artists (who will be disproportionately be of colour because young people are disproportionately of colour!) wouldn't be the main beneficiaries of looser copyright laws.
I think a lot of it is the advent of what Matt has called "Lawyer brain" where a lot of people posit that a rule-following disposition is inherently virtuous. Generally following the rules is good, but also there is the to mix in some shit-stirring because it is true that the rich and powerful generally make the rules for their own benefit. The posts I've seen about copyright shows a lot of people who are self-interested in long copyright terms, being supported by people who basically just think rules are good.
In my experience private-sector lawyers generally don't have that delusion--they work for corporations and wealthy or middle-class individuals all day and realize they're just a service industry. But students going to law school vastly underestimate how many of them will become private-sector lawyers. There really aren't many jobs for public interest law or in government and those jobs are often (a) hard to get and (b) strongly prefer hiring people with private-sector experience, so virtually everyone works in firms for corporations at some point.
This is the thesis of Listen, Liberal! by Thomas Frank.
I am something of a veteran of talking to authors about things that they don't like, and the thing to remember about authors of novels etc is: there is no reason to believe that they are particularly smart, well informed about policy, intellectually rigorous in their imported philosophy, or generally worth listening to about politics at all.
They do tend to be reasonable eloquent, which can obscure other lacks, because that's their professional skill! But in general the ones I interacted with had rather venal opinions informed by a narrow sense of what was in their interests as authors, that I think they tended to pick up organically from the culture of other authors.
I’m this case it’s more than status quo bias. It’s people in media promoting their self interest
On twitter N.K. Jemisin offhandedly endorsed the idea of "Life plus 15 or 30" although I think the idea of "30 years or life, whichever is longer" is better and I'm guessing she would agree with a proposition like that.
N.K. Jemisin brought up some good points saying that copyrights that don't last for a lifetime would end up reducing the income of an author when they might need that income the most, when they're elderly. Artists aren't known for a proclivity to save up retirement accounts, so I think she has a fair point pushing back on the 28 years idea.
She was just reacting negatively to the idea of ending copyright before the death of the creator, but Jemisin and Yglesias came to basically the same conclusion.
The initial reaction by artists is going to be bad, but I think this kind of change could get broader buy-in from the artistic community.
> would end up reducing the income of an author when they might need that income the most
This is a really bad argument for an artificial monopoly for a particular industry (i.e. copyright). It's a really good argument for improving our social safety nets (and, arguably, financial literacy and access).
YES. It reminds me of ordinary Republicans denouncing the inheritance tax.
There was in fact a legal challenge by the Holmes estate over Enola Holmes. The earliest Holmes stories are in the public domain but not the latest ones. The estate said that since Enola Holmes portrayed Sherlock as empathetic, a trait Conan Doyle added later in the series, then any empathetic emotions by Sherlock in Enola Holmes was a copyright violation. It appears this was settled by Netflix out of court. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/22/lawsuit-copyright-warmer-sherlock-holmes-dismissed-enola-holmes
That's wild
(Obviously I meant the Conan Doyle estate, not the Holmes estate)
As a fellow veteran of the 1998 copyright wars, I cannot express how goddamn dispiriting it is to see the entire debate replayed in The Discourse at twitter speed, and to watch otherwise intelligent young people to not only take what would have been, circa-1998, considered reducto-ad-absurdem bad faith caricatures of the copyright maximalist position, but to describe them not even as a _position_ (ie: one of multiple possible competing alternatives) but as some sort of statement of natural law.
The bad guys won the copyright argument, and now we live in a world where it seems to be absurd to even consider an alternative approach. And statistically every last one of these idiots stumping for eternal copyright protection will have spent $100 or more in the last year (well, maybe not 2020) on entertainments that exist because of corporations using copyright law to commit wholesale larceny against a small group of prewar Jewish comic book authors, or on a form of music (hip-hop) that would never have been allowed to _exist_ had our current copyright regime been in place in 1975.
(Belated postscript: a specific shout-out of disappointment to N.K. Jemisin, who's "The City We Became" is completely and correctly invested in the cultural centrality of hip-hop to NYC that the 1998 copyright act was in part designed to make impossible to recur.)
Seeing so many (very successful) authors so blatantly trying to make The Progressive Take the one that exactly served their obvious self-interests to response to your tweet would have been hilarious if they weren't so successful in doing so. Progressivism means protecting the wealth-generation abilities of Walt Disney, famously-racist old dead guy, for the Walt Disney Company ($DIS)! Boggles the mind. Beyond that, the last time I remember seeing that crowd get mad was at the Internet Archive, possible the most selfless organization on the internet, for having the gall to freely loan scanned copies of old books during the early days of the pandemic. Heroic acts of punching down like that make me wish we had a proper Pirate Party like they do in the Europe.
I think the worse was I saw James Poniewozik, the TV critic for the Times, piously talking about the rights of creators. Does he remember that Mad Men had to shell out $250 grand for a Beatles song? Does he think maybe other shows with smaller budgets might want to use Beatles songs now and then?
Now now, if dangerous notions like that start becoming popular, we might impoverish the feeble estate of good Sir Paul McCartney!
I just re-watched the entire series. Great stuff. On one of the episode closes (season 4 IIRC) they rolled into the credits with the Muzak version of a Beatles song, presumably for the reasons being discussed here. I shudder to think about the body blow society would have received had Matthew Weiner been able to get away with using the Beatles recording.
There's a brilliant British TV programme that talks about how to make...erm television programmes. It has a funny bit where the presenter notes that as its the BBC they can play whatever they want without having to pay, due to a sweetheart deal the BBC has with the record industry. So he plays a bit of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He then says he cannot show us the album cover, because as a copyrighted piece of art, that would cost the show thousands of pounds to show unless they were reviewing/critiquing it.
People love agreeing with their favorite authors and creators on Twitter because it feels like a sort of relationship. And once you've retweeted that author, you're locked into the position to some extent, so the ability to really absorb the counter-arguments (from, I don't know, an up-and-coming rapper or someone) is greatly reduced.
I think this is part of it. The internet went from everyone ripping off and remixing stuff in the early 2000s to 'stanning' things. God damn Gen Z!
I'm just glad to see that scandals now get the "-ghazi" treatment instead of the "-gate" attachment. Gate had become stale and predictable, stifling the creativity of the country. This is progress.
If it doesn't it should.
A decade ago on the internet, this would have been the majority take, completely uncontroversial. I’m shocked at how much that’s changed. I had a quasi-prominent author on Twitter accuse me of wanting writers to be unable to eat just because I suggested that maybe “Life + 70” was a little bit too long! It’s wild.
Hard to see how the +70 part helps any author eat, unless they're selling the future revenue stream during their lifetime.
I seem to remember David Bowie doing something like that, but I’m too lazy to Google it right now.
I actually don’t know what a standard publishing contract is like—if I sell a book to a publisher, do they typically retain the copyright for its entire term? If so, I guess I would be selling the future revenue stream during my lifetime. (Still is too long though. Especially because 95%+ of copyrighted things won’t still be making money after its author has been dead for 70 years.)
Much like every poor american is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, every mid-shelf-or-lower author on twitter is a temporarily embarrassed JK Rowling.
As someone who remembers the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, when Congress ripped 20 years of public domain away at the behest of corporate lobbyist, I am left with a lifelong disgust for copyright maximalist and would be happy to revert it to 28 years with registration required.
No one has ever explained why granting 20 years of extended copyright retroactively promotes people to be creative. I'm no expert on entropy, but since we remember the past and not the future, it seems to me that extending copyright in 1998 to works written before 1998 does nothing but shaft the public.
I mean, from when I was 19 to 39 literally not a damn thing entered the public domain.
Copyright is a government-created, government-regulated monopoly. Government sets the cost (duration), and the public pays the price. As such, the cost should be as low as possible but just high enough to get the job done.
Its like when the government would offer a bounty for anyone to do a job. As long as someone does the job, there is no reason to set the bounty higher.
Mark Twain wrote most of his novels under a 42 year copyright. He made a lot of money with a 42 year term. And he is considered a great american author and his works are some of the greatest american novels. Clearly 42 year terms was enough to entice great authors to write great works.
A more in depth examination of the copyright as bounty here. Click on the html link to read for free.
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/index.htm
Side note: Mein Kampf indeed was under copyright (German law is death plus 70 years) until fairly recently, held by the Bavarian state which banned all publications - severely hampering the publication of new historic commentary on the complete work in Germany.
Yes and my understanding is that profits for the English version of Mein Kampf go to the Red Cross.
Sherlock Holmes is free and excellent, and people should know about Standard eBooks, who collectively provide many, high-quality, out-of-copyright books for free, including Holmes: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/arthur-conan-doyle/the-adventures-of-sherlock-holmes
According to the founders, copyright law exists only as an incentive to get the work created. It was not created because the founders felt that authors have a natural right to be remunerated for the work out of some sense of fairness. So we're basically just talking about a utilitarian "trade" between creators and society. That's it. No duty to creators. No need for the system to be "fair" to creators.
So that brings us to the question of how much of an incentive is needed to get creators and inventors to do their thing. For this, we can draw from a tool from finance called Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dcf.asp
This tried and true financial tool is widely used by investors to decide whether it's wise to invest some amount of dollars today in return for some series of risky returns to be received in the future. The trick with DCF is that dollars received after 25 or 30 years have almost zero value today because they are so heavily discounted by uncertainty of time.
In other words, if you're thinking about writing a book and deciding whether it's worth it, you'll weigh the dollars you'd earn for the first 10-20 years very heavily in your decision, but will almost completely discount or ignore the possibility of earning dollars after 20 years. Potential earnings that are so far away and uncertain wouldn't factor at all into your decision to write a book or do something else with your time.
To me, this is the most compelling reason to limit copyright law to a timeframe in the 20-30 year range. This preserves 99% of the incentive to create great works while giving the public the benefit of any bonus residual value that remains after the term expires.
Yes, but the term depends substantially on the discount rate. Right now the "real" interest rate (not counting inflation because you assume that the price you get for something in the future will increase with inflation) is negative.
I get your point overall, but I don't think it'd be appropriate to use a negative discount rate in most cases. While it's true that nowadays real financing costs for capital projects can be negative, generally, for broader investment decisions that have varying levels of riskiness, most would say the appropriate discount rate to use is one that's based on the riskiness of the future cash flows, not on an average cost of finance.
This is especially true when you're using DCF to decide between alternative investments of varying riskiness.
For example, the stream of cash flows from a utility scale solar project where the regulatory environment is stable and most of the plant's output is presold with power purchase agreements is a lot less risky than the cash flow stream from an investment in a small modular nuclear reactor project. Under normal market conditions, you wouldn't use the same discount rate for these two projects.
(as an aside, to your original point, one of the main reasons utility scale solar costs have plummeted recently is that finance costs for these projects plummeted as investors became so comfortable with their risk profiles). Investor estimates of the riskiness of the future cash flows from these projects dropped markedly as they got more experience with them and that meant all of a sudden the projects could attract financing at super cheap rates.)
Yes, my point was that you can't use a negative discount rate because the NPV would be infinite and the valuation of returns far in the future would be increasing, not diminishing. All of the considerations that you are describing are specific to the risks of the project (and risk tolerance for the investor) but to justify copyright term on the basis of discounting, aren't you requiring the same discount rate for everything subject to copyright?
>> ...but to justify copyright term on the basis of discounting, aren't you requiring the same discount rate for everything subject to copyright?
The short answer is yes. But in truth the exact discount rate doesn't matter very much once you get out to 30 years. Keep in mind there are two things going on as the time horizon expands. First, an increasing proportion of the total expected future revenue stream is captured as the term expands. Second, the discounting impact becomes greater and greater on that smaller and smaller part that's left behind.
At 30 years out, the cash flows become extremely uncertain and I'd posit a discount rate in the 10-15% range would be the minimum called for. At a 10% discount rate, the present value of a dollar in 30 years is $0.06. At 15%, that dollar is only worth $0.01.
That's where my claim came from that at almost any sane discount rate, 30 years let's creators capture 99% of the value of their work in present value adjusted dollars. The added incentive to creators for a longer term of 50 years or 70 years is basically nil.
I think your argument is becoming circular. Because we don’t know what will happen 30 years out, there’s little point in caring about it so we assign it a high discount rate so it doesn’t matter.
I also think you’re double counting. You don’t set a discount rate of 10-15% for each year up to thirty years. The large discount at thirty years is the result of compounding of a lower rate over the 30 years
That's a good line of argument, and one I had not thought of before.
My kids will live off Full House
Bob, you really got to look into handling your estate properly so that your kids don't need to live off of syndication royalties.
Which is an argument for why we need to bring back the estate tax.
Have mercy!
you mean your great great great grandchildren
So rad!!!
Imagine the uproar if Congress tried to retroactively extend patent protection for pharmaceuticals, like it did with copyright. I don't recall the details but there were some challenges to the constitutionality of retroactive extensions of IP, since heaping more rewards on an already-created work doesn't promote progress of science or arts.
There was a challenge to the Sonny Bono act (the last retroactive extension) on those grounds, but unfortunately it lost.
The case was Eldred v. Reno. Justice Breyer’s dissent is worth reading.
I'm a classical musician, and in our world, it is still very much the common belief that copyright law is crazy and creativity-stifling, and everyone despises Disney and Sonny Bono.
Music publishers are absolutely horrible companies that only exist because of their monopoly interests. They charge outrageous fees for performances of works within copyright and this adds to the problem of our art form being viewed as stodgy, old, and white.
Let's say you're a start-up chamber orchestra and you want to program a piece by a living Latina composer, but her publisher is going to charge you $800 / performance. You might not expect to break even on that. If you could, instead, program a Mozart symphony which is FREE, it's easy to see why people default to the canon.
Music copyright's effect on live performance is absolutely its most baleful aspect.
Or as my favorite tiny folk cafe put it, on a sign stage left:
BMI and ASCAP
want my dough
if you play covers
out you go!
Burma Shave
Why limit it to intellectual property? IIRC in Singapore almost all the real estate is owned by the government and citizens can purchase 99 year leases. In a sense real property is treated like intellectual property in that ownership of both has a finite life.
This is kind of how a land value tax works. The government effectively owns the land and "rents" it out to the owners for a certain periodical payment based on how valuable it is. Check out Georgism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fzk_Sc4bBY
The Land! The Land! 'Twas God who made the land!
The Land! The Land! The ground on which we stand!
Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the Land to the People!
All joking aside, LVT is a great idea, especially on the local level. (Dunno if I'd call it a great idea to be the *only* tax like many Georgists claimed, but whatever.) The current system of real estate tax--taxing improved value in addition to the raw land value--creates all kinds of weird perverse incentives that measurably makes life worse for people. There was a good Weeds on it in April-May 2016 (the shownotes are here: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/2/11533936/the-weeds-land-value-tax-explained).
Still the official party song of the (British) Liberal Democrats. It's quite a lot of fun to sing as an anthem (ie a large group of amateurs singing in unison).
The most upsetting thing to me is, truly, the Jim Carrey version of the Grinch. Can we cancel that?