Thanks for featuring me! I love talking about how to make copyright work better for artists and think it’s an especially important issue in the age of AI.
I think the switch to streaming media has to be a big part of this discussion. Back in the olden days, if you really liked something, you bought the album. I've got CDs I bought as a kid in the 90s, the money changed hands back then, and that was that. Occasionally I dust one off and play it, but no further revenue is generated, they can't even harvest data that I did it for their algorithms. But with streaming, someone gets paid every time a song is played, no matter how old. This makes popular back catalogs very valuable.
This is a really good point--IP holders want to make you rent their works instead of buying them if they can get away with it. It's a good reason to hold onto those physical copies if one can.
Actually this is about technology making copying so easy that if they didn’t “rent” the works, they would sell one or two copies and go broke as was feared with the early file sharing apps. Back in the days when people bought records was when having a hit could make someone rich overnight, and record companies had money to burn. Back when you had to buy a newspaper, reporters and journalists could make a reasonably secure living, and the owners of the publications could make a considerable profit from it.
Streaming is basically casual music fans subsidizing hardcore ones. If you bought 3 CDs a year in 1996 and otherwise just flipped between the three stations you liked, paying $132 a year for Spotify may be less appealing (though you might be OK with the free tier). If you bought $500 a year in obscure vinyl in 1996, paying a quarter of that for unlimited access to essentially all commercially released music in human history is an incredible bargain.
Well - if total cost is lower - as in e.g. unsold CDs which are a physical good cost, all the logistics and storage around those - and a broader stable revenue stream is achieved, it seems likely that the net revenue is better.
Back in the day the labels had an incentive to forcibly turn over what was popular... now I think we are learning that left to their own devices people will listen to the same thing for 3-5 years where the "CD" model you were trying to cycle new stuff in every 2 months.
This reminds me of a comment I saw approx. 25 years ago or so about Top 40 vs. Classic Rock radio (sadly, I can't remember who wrote it):
I know it's popular to hate Top 40 radio because it plays the same thing over and over. But while you'll hear the new Christina Aguilera single 10 times a day, every day, that will only be for two months. Then it will be replaced by the new Good Charlotte single, which will be played 10 times a day, every day, for two months, and then it will be replaced by the new Avril Lavigne single, etc., etc. Whereas with Classic Rock, you'll hear Boston's "More than a Feeling" 10 times a day, every day, for the next 30 years.
if you have satellite radio the appeal of the top 40 format becomes even more clear. Even the "indie" station is a top 40 station, they just have a rotation of 20 classic indie songs (Pavement/Radiohead/Arcade Fire/Wolf Parade) and 20 new ones (MJ Lenderman/Wet Leg).
I think its better because there is a lot less talking during AM commute time. But the playlist is no better and maybe even worse. As a real Alt-Country/dad rock enjoyer the "Outlaw Country" station is essentially the definition of "mid..." isn't outlaw country supposed to be at least nominally a risk-taking genre? So much forgettable music with a southern accent.
Alas, Orwell's "1984" is still copyright protected in the US (but, ironically, not the UK) because I have my revised O'Brien quote to Winston Smith in the can and ready to go: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine Boston's 'More than a Feeling' playing in your ear —forever."
A huge chunk of the CD boom was labels monetizing their back catalog and reissuing everything onto the new CD format. Classic rock, oldies, and the "70's, 80's, 90's and beyond" radio formats have always been popular. I'm not sure we're seeing anything now that hasn't been true for 50+ years at this point.
(One exception to that is the success streamers are having with AI-generated material populating background listening playlists. The horrifying reality may be that many people don't really care about what they listen to at all.)
I think the fact that Taylor Swift has essentially been the dominant commercial force in music since 1989 (11 years) is a HUGE difference with the 80s and 90s. Yes old stuff would come back. But the life cycle of a pop act (broadly construed, also including rap, r & b and popular rock music) was dramatically shorter in the pre-streaming age.
I don't know, I could point to U2, Michael Jackson, and Madonna all having that sort of dominance; I think they, like Swift, are just outliers in that regard. If anything, I think the change has been a compression where attention goes only to a few top acts, while it's the middle-charting bands and performers that struggle to make a career out of their music.
I agree that the middle class is eroding for sure. That said I think if you look at the 80s Madonna and Michael Jackson were huge but they were not nearly as much bigger than the next biggest acts than Taylor is now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Top_Artist The music industry was bigger overall so they were probably more culturally significant, but relative to other artists the gap was smaller (this overlaps also with Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, and George Michael).
Another thing you don't see in nearly the same way is artists with extremely short but extremely high peaks... Shania Twain for example had two megahit records in '95 and '97 (up in '02 was huge as well but was five years later and there was nothing between). Or 50 cent who was basically the dominant musical act for a single year.
Michael was only releasing an album every 4 years, hard to dominate each year in that scenario. Taylor is far more prolific.
The short high peaks thing also still happens. Justin Bieber is a Shania Twain analogue. Olivia Rodrigo might end up being the 50 Cent equivalent depending.
Agreed. The Beatles were dominant for nearly a decade. The Stones were a major force for much longer than that. Ditto the other acts you cite. And today's pop scene features its share of one hit wonders.
The Beatles had 7 years (Taylor is in Year 12). The Stones were second-tier by the mid-70s even though they were famous. I do think Taylor's reign is longer. But it's also important to note that from 2017-2019 she was seen as washed up/kind of a joke. She has more of a rare dual-peak career like Aerosmith.
Part of the issue is that the entire pop music ecosystem was reinvented in the late 1950s - “oldies” has never really gone older than that, and still goes back to nearly that point today, just with more decades included.
Yes, this is the point I keep bringing up about alleged stagnation in popular (broadly defined) music -- you need to invent a new genre of music that basically kills all demand for the prior dominant genres among new consumers in the same manner that the introduction of rock & roll in the 1950s all but completely cut off interest in older forms of popular music among people born post-1935 or so.
I haven’t read a good history, but I assume that’s the advent of radio in cars and music as a lo-fi broadcast form. C.f. Bing Crosby as a pop artist who sang for the recording microphone, as opposed to his peers who sang for the crowd in front of them.
"Liked" for the accuracy of many of your observations here (I've said for years that the historical impermanence of recording media combined with introduction of new recording formats was papering over the "dead hand" (dead throat?) issue that music is facing now), but I disagree with the "horrifying" part. The toleration (if not enjoyment) of AI-generated music for background listening is simply finally making undeniable that which music elitists have frothingly denied for decades despite its self-evident truth -- the average person really doesn't give a $h!t in most instances about the creator(s) of the music.
It’s also killed off the influence of elite tastemakers. Ironically, that means less unique and innovative sounds because the algorithm chases predictable success. And the best predictors for an algorithm are similarities to past success.
Right - and these older songs are well-represented on playlists that will generate streams for the owner even if few people are actively choosing to listen to that artist. So these can be stable revenue even if they’re recognizable only from a particular occasion’s playlist. Makes me wonder how much the copyright issue plays into the encroachment of Christmas music into October!
Let’s keep the focus on attorneys. We have too many of them and their mindset has way too much influence in the Democratic Party, per various other Slow Boring posts. The concerns in this one are just an example.
I am an attorney, and 100% agree. But how do we reduce the influence of attorneys?
I'm of the mind that attorneys are a symptom, not a cause.
1. The US (and the other FIVE EYES countries) have been very stable for a long time. This means they've been able to build up significant regulatory states that encourage intellectual efforts to go to law.
2. The UK-derived common law system and adversarial processes encourage use of lawyers.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, a catchphrase for career was “doctor, lawyer, Indian chief”. Law is a default path for far too many affluent kids who are good at school. We can erode that by arguing against it. Jennifer Pahlka is working on changing our culture around legislating from emphasizing texts to emphasizing outcomes[1]. Then there is the abundance movement, which is in part a prestige shift from law / “policy” to construction and project management.
There's something going on here though that a lot of analysts are missing...
Why has China totally stopped converging with the U.S. (and in fact gone backwards) when they are training way more scientists and engineers while we continue to have a ton of lawyers and finance people. On some level I do see the issues with the overly regulated u.s. economy. On another level though our topline economic numbers are pretty incredible so I think analysts should have a hard look at this... I think any admonition that we are seriously fucking up should be accompanied by an acknowledgment that we are doing a lot right. And if we change things we don't want to lose all the good things we're doing.
Probably nothing to be gained by talking people out of the law. The people choosing it will otherwise go into finance or working to build the next B2B SaaS tech stack. We’ve sorta stopped pushing people to doing anything actually useful in this country.
"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." It's right there in the Constitution that IP is not granted out of fairness or the interests of ensuring great great great grandchildren can make money for nothing, it's to promote progress of the arts and sciences. Patents are their own issue, but it's clear current copyright law no longer even considers progress as a factor.
Right. The founders believed creators and inventors had no natural right to benefit from the fruits of their creations and inventions. None whatsoever.
So copyrights and patents were intentionally designed to create rights that creators and inventors don't actually deserve or have any moral claim to. The whole point was to give creators something they're not entitled to solely as a trade off that the founders believed would enhance public welfare overall by encouraging more creation and invention.
So really, copyright and patents should extend no longer than what's needed to create an adequate/optimal incentive. Considering how discounted cash flow analysis works, that's probably 25-40 years at the absolute maximum. Beyond that, the present value of those far out future cash flows is essentially zero and provides no incentive to creators and inventors.
There's a power-law issue here, where for the overwhelmingly vast majority of works, all or essentially all of the profits are made in the first 10 or 20 years, but for the tiny minority of works that retain mass appeal beyond then, the majority of the profits come late in the life cycle of the work. The law is designed to hoard those late profits for the handful of super-successful works at the cost of massive underutilization of middling works. It's maddening.
Patents are already limited to a term of 20 years from the date of filing, which is extended only in a few circumstances (delay at the USPTO, sometimes delays in government approvals for medical products).
I love to see this topic get some attention. I think it's a bigger problem than we realize and I think about it all the time. I'd love to see libraries and streaming services of works that the creators have voluntarily made more accessible. I think there is plenty of excellent art going unnoticed and I'd be glad to turn my attention toward less close-fisted artists if there were a way for me to do that.
20 years is too short, but life + 75 is way too long.
I'd like to just see a flat time frame. I'll go with 50 years. The most important thing is to build a coalition for such a timeframe rather than let people spend all their time trying to change that number a little bit.
Patent attorney here! I'm glad to see someone point to Article I, Section 8. And I agree strongly that while the patent system has some issues, copyright is a complete mess.
I actually think that copyright would benefit enormously from working more like patents, with a much shorter term and requirement that a copy of the copyrighted work be provided to the USPTO within a short period of public release. The USPTO should make all copyrighted works available after 20 years.
EDIT: I would also require maintenance fees for copyrights.
Copyright is also a restriction on free speech (which is why the Constitution has to call out an exception) but we've abandoned our principles to adopt European moral rights nonsense. Can someone whisper in Trump's ear about this?
Death of the creator seems like a weird milestone for the IP timeline. It may have made sense way back when, but in an era when you can sell your catalog to someone else, it’s very odd that its value depends on your physical health. When terms last many decades after your death, maybe that doesn’t mean a lot, but if we shorten the terms, it will matter more. Fifty years from first publication sounds right to me, regardless of circumstances.
It would at least make sense for the clock to start running as soon as the rights are sold. So when Springsteen sells his catalog, it's the equivalent, for copyright purposes, of his death.
I’m not sure I entirely buy this. Basic growth theory (e.g. recent Nobel laureates Romer, Aghion, and Howitt) suggests that IP protections usually incentivize innovation.
There’s an important consideration that this article leaves out: if you do manage to create successful new IP, you make a shitload of money. The main argument that the author uses to wave this away is a sort of “lump of capital” fallacy: if investing in old IP is profitable, then there are fewer resources available to invest in new IP. In the short run, these industries may be slow to adjust in size, but you’d certainly expect them to massively expand in the long run if there were hugely profitable prospects lying around. I therefore suspect that there’s something fundamentally unprofitable about new IP rather than “crowding out” from existing IP. (These IP protections have existed for a long time. Why is culture only stagnating now?)
(Note: there are other arguments about why IP protections may harm innovation, but none of them are present here. The one thing I found interesting and convincing was the bit about litigation.)
A different theory: we are indeed seeing massive cultural innovation, but we no longer have a mass culture. It’s not profitable to invest in new movies, but there’s tons of money and dynamism in podcasting, streaming, etc. However, everyone is siloed off into their own little corner of culture, so it’s hard for anyone to see how much dynamism there actually is.
Basic economic theory says yes IP protection incentizes.
That is not the same as saying that permanently ever extending IP protection well beyond the lifespan of the creator or creating parties (the actual humans) ipso facto incentizes innovation. The contrary, in general in economics we recognise that any such items always reach points of diminshing and even negative returns.
Stagnation may be developing as the longer-term effect of the particularly extremely long
protections adjustment effects (rather of the same kind that tariffs didn't immediately feed through to inflation but one now is starting to see the adjustments).
I haven't a strong opinion overall (and don't particularly care if culture may be stagnating or not), but your critique is quite itself flawed from economics pov.
To be clear, I agree with this comment, and indeed in most models of growth, maximal IP protections are suboptimal. (I pointed this out in my original comment as well.)
What I was trying to say is that this article somehow didn’t even address the elephant in the room (the fact that there are huge profits on the table for new entrants), and it misses most of the usual counterarguments about why maximal IP protections can be bad. The argument that the article does provide is flawed.
“IP protections are harming innovation” is a big claim that deserves better support.
I mean, isn't the crowding out as much about the consumption/demand side as the production side. Excessively long IP protection seems to be shifting investment from creation to sales and marketing efforts.
That results in older creations capturing an outsized share of demand for creative works. This saps demand for new creations so we get less of them.
For movies the argument is usually a combination of audience shifts (simpler, action-heavy, non-writing dependent plots play more easily overseas), lack of DVD sales meaning that the optimization pressures have to be specifically for tentpole releases that make their money in their theatrical runs, and extremely large capital outlays making everyone more risk averse such that you end up with a “missing middle” of the kind of films that characterize a lot of the output of the 1990s.
(Of course, that’s not getting into less straightforwardly causative aspects like competition from other forms of entertainment and the theatre experience turning to garbage between obscene prices and smartphones.)
The theatre experience seems so much better than before, I think. Movie theaters didn’t even start to put in stadium seating until I was a late teenager. Not to mention there’s IMAX, partial or full, at a lot of theatres. The prices are high, but it makes it less crowded.
I don’t see movies in the theatres much because streaming is so good (and I tend to prefer series to movies). And because not much stuff comes out that I want to see. Third reason is the prices, though a movie is cheaper than most other forms of entertainment around me even now. But it’s always fun when I do go.
Seating I'll give you, but experience? Last time I went to a Regal they had *25 fucking minutes* of ads and trailers (trailers being, of course, also ads) past the posted start time before the damn movie started without no indication of an *actual* start time to let you skip it. *I* am paying *them* money to be provided a service, not to have my valuable time wasted while being treated like a product. The volume levels on "Furiosa" were at *literally* painful levels, and over all of this is the spectre of the fucking phones ruining the whole thing without recourse to violence and property destruction as the warranted correctives.
General ticket prices have generally matched inflation. Premium movie experiences (like IMAX) are, duh, more expensive.
Even for the non-premium formats, the technology (and the theaters) are far more comfortable than previously, as you note. So one could argue that ticket prices really haven't gone up that much. Given the falling popularity of movies, that's pretty much what we should expect.
And yeah, if I’m going to a movie, if it’s an action movie I definitely spring for the full IMAX. There’s a really nice one in the science museum here that was great for Dune. They even had the haptics so you felt your chair vibrate when the ornithopters were around
IP protections in the real world hinder innovation on net especially combined with how the US legal system works. There are probably dozens of trolls for every legitimate IP complaint and it can cost millions of dollars to litigate one of these even if you win, and the bounds of IP are quite vague when it comes to what’s too similar so there’s no guarantee of winning even if the case is unreasonable, discouraging people from building on what came before. In the most innovative sector of our economy (AI) the leading labs have openly sworn off using patents offensively, yet this hasn’t stopped innovation in AI, nor has the non-protectability of inventions and works created with AI deterred people from using AI; if anything copyright laws are the biggest threat to AI innovation.
There's clearly something to your theory, but it still doesn't seem great if we're entering a world where the vast majority of creative products which aim to reach a wide audience are drawing on long established IP.
I think you can argue that there's only really so much space for the biggest works. How many multi-hundred million dollar films or video games is there market demand for each year? Probably no more than the low double digits each. If most such projects that are greenlit use established IP that inevitably narrows the space for new ideas and stories.
Of course in some sense it's wonderful that an independent developer or streamer can make content that sells to a few thousand people and make it living off it, but those types of works don't replace the impact and influence of new works that aim to reach a mass audience.
And I think on "why didn't this happen until now?" the answer might be as simple as that it's only relatively recently (the last couple of decades) that publishers sussed out how to optimise revenue from the existing mass of creative IP. Partly due to technology and market developments making this more possible and effective (digital distribution etc.), but also partly just general ignorance of how to build and exploit IP effectively - even something as mammoth as Star Wars lay largely unexploited for nearly two decades after the original trilogy (1977 - 1983); licensing established IP to make major video game productions has only really taken off in the past 15 years.
People will not go to the movie theater to see a low or mid budget movie. Thus, studios have to swing big with huge budget extravagances. Added to that is that there are no surefire stars that will bring people to the theater. Because so much money is at stake, studios will be inherently conservative, and err (or profit!) in the direction of what has worked before (no more John Carter's).
That game was great and it deserves whatever awards it wins - but it was also a 'AA' game (not the huge budget of a AAA game).
In the indie / smaller game space you can definitely find a variety of games(I also loved Blue Prince from last year)
I'd say a few things here:
1) Games are (generally) much less likely to yell at each other about "copying" gameplay elements. Nintendo patented a few things recently which irk me, but traditionally games have been less litigious about borrowing elements. Heck, Blizzard's rise was partly on doing super-polished versions of game ideas others explored first (RTS, Rogue-like, MMO).
2) Indie helps too - and I think if you went to listen to indie music with smaller bands you'd probably still get interesting stuff, although interesting doesn't mean "will like it" (For instance I know some people really hated the parry/dodge part of Expedition 33, and complaints about how RNG-heavy Blue Prince gets at the end are fair)
Sometimes an indie band/game really breaks through (Expedition 33 and Blue Prince also received excellent press coverage, and both were also available on XBox GamePass) - but the ones that break through are more likely to be the innovative ones - so a bit of selection bias.
3) Plenty of games can feel 'derivative' without having the IP issue - look how many "extraction shooters" keep coming out. You may not notice for the indie ones but I definitely see this trend among AAA games.
So... I think this is partly a real phenomenon (where games feel free to take good elements from other games and mix-and-match without arguments about 'sampling' - although games that really _do_ get too derivative do get panned), and partly a selection bias issue where you may be more familiar with games/discoverability of games.
Expedition 33 being an AA game is just fucking crazy to me. The final Act II boss fight alone is more graphically sumptuous than entire indie games. And the game's fucking huge! (Arguably too huge to the point it kinds throws off the pacing in Act III, which is where I was reminded of why my general preference for linear over open-world narratives exists.)
It's definitely on the high end of AA games but they only had about 35 "core" team members (there's a bunch of IMO stupid discourse insisting that their team was much larger because you need to count e.g., every musicion who played on their score. I quite liked the score and music (especially the mansion theme) but someone who contributed 80 _hours_ of work on the game is not even in the same ballpark as someone who put 80 _weeks_ of work into the game, and AAA games, even counting outsourcers, often have lots of outsourcers who have individually put at least half a year into a game.)
I very much have, as well as the (incredible) Hollow Knight: Silksong - between them the two best games I've played this year. But these kinds of productions are the (very welcome) exception, not the rule. The world of big budget video games has been characterised by ever more remakes, sequels and remasters, with the same designs, IP and characters being used over and over again. And this is entirely understandable from the publishers' point of view, because more and more gaming hours - especially among the under 20s - are being taken up by "forever games" Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft (plus, to a lesser extent, Madden, CoD and GTA Online), so one of the few ways that bigger projects can be sure of at least some attention is to draw on the appeal of established brands and characters.
Several big publishers have recently made it very clear they intend to focus on core high value IP to the exclusion of everything else - and given how much pressure they are under, I think their decisions make a lot of sense (as depressing as it is).
I do think it is very true to say there's more innovation and creativity in mass market games than in movies at present, but whether there's as much as seen between, say, 1995 and 2010, I find doubtful.
Some of this is real, like the fact that cultural innovation is in new formats like podcast and short video.
But other bits of this assume a kind of market rationality that is never a great model of creative artistic production by individuals. Extending copyright increases financial incentives, but individual artists (as opposed to corporate creators like movie studios) are not especially sensitive to the potential long run gambles, the way they are to short term financial incentives, and all the non-financial incentives of reputation and creativity.
But I think my point works even if creativity isn't sensitive to financial incentives.
Suppose the arrival rate of new ideas is constant. So, every year, studios have the same number of directors/writers coming to them with new pitches. If IP protection is going to yield high profits in the future, wouldn't studios want to pursue more of these projects rather than fewer?
What the author says is that old projects suck up financial resources that would be directed towards new projects. My point was that the "crowding out" the author gestures at seems weak to me, since the industry can expand in the long run if studios really could earn exorbitant returns on new IP.
Studio films are far more likely to be sensitive to financial incentives than most art, because they are mostly produced by big corporations that have financialized motives.
Record labels are relevant for popular music, but don't control it as much as studios control filmmaking and television, and for other art forms like novels, poetry, painting, and shorter format streaming video, there's much more direct control by individual artists, who find a lot of their incentives come from non-financial directions (and who don't have the awareness to deal with long-run expected value calculations).
Ok, sure, there are sectors where the financial incentives don't matter as much. But then how do we explain the data for novels/poetry/painting etc.? If these are simply insensitive to financial incentives, how could IP protections explain the (claimed) stagnation at all? (I'm actually not sure these sectors have stagnated -- have they?)
Patent terms are 20 years—it seems strange to give so much more generous terms to art/music/literature than to patents, which are in theory for useful inventions. I guess it’s because they are useful that we see the obvious problem in restricting access for longer? That said I don’t think anything particularly bad would happen if copyrights were 20 years from the time of publication. Most artists struggle and if they make anything off their novel it’s probably going to happen in the first few years, so we’re really just arguing about whether the successful stars/writers are rich or megarich. I love the compulsory licensing idea as well.
I think many people consider a work of art to be something deeply (spiritually?) significant to an artist. There’s a JK Rowling quote about how she hates fan-fiction because she thinks of her characters as her children.
Imagine someone saying this about patented work like a drug of a piece of machinery. It would sound ridiculous! But saying it about art is par for the course. I think this is why AI art/copyright infringement has drawn such ire, why death of the artist remains a popular copyright timeline benchmark, and why you see people in these comments suggesting timelines like 50 years instead of 20.
Edit: To be abundantly clear, my point here is this. All of us economics nerds at slow boring might like to think of copyrights as limited monopolies granted to incentivize production. But a lot of people see them as more than that, because they see artists as having certain moral rights over their creation. These different rationales for copyright will prescribe different timelines for protection.
JK Rowling was/is unusually accepting of fanfiction—that quote was chiefly related to fanfic erotica and how she wouldn’t read it.
Patents are also more likely to be related to corporate work—I do have a couple of patents, but reading through the lawyerese that the description and claims turned into (I did get to write the examples at least) I’m often more embarrassed by them than anything.
Oh man reading patents is no fun. What grinds my gears is the way patent holders deliberately make their patents hard to search for so you will violate them so they can sue you later, at least in the industry where I had to do this.
I have never heard of anyone deliberately making patents difficult to find. In fact, it's common for patent holders to advertise the fact that their patents cover some of their products.
I saw it in my field. Using very weird wording and even British spellings on keywords to make them hard to search for. It made it more likely we would go on a track in our research that would ultimately be foreclosed because it was already patented (which may have been the real ulterior motive, to delay competition)
"There’s a JK Rowling quote about how she hates fan-fiction because she thinks of her characters as her children."
See also Gene Roddenberry's views on non-canon works. The Great Bird had some pretty specific ideas about what his universe should be like, especially during the TNG era.
I thought it was the other way around! I.e. we thought we needed short patent terms precisely because we want inventions to be copied and disseminated fairly quickly so the whole world can take advantage of them, and especially so that other inventors can combine it with other technology to keep progress going. Whereas with copyright it doesn't matter if no one can sell a story as their own for a long time (not like people are going to starve or die of disease because they didn't have access to an existing novel or song).
I've written about this up-thread. I'm a US patent attorney, and I think we would benefit from copyrights working much more like patents.
-Patents get a term of 20 years from date of filing; extensions are limited and documented on the front page of the patent. This is a reasonable term, and fairly easy to calculate.
-Patents have to be filed with the USPTO within a very limited time of public release of the invention. Copyrights don't have to be filed right now.
-The USPTO publishes patents and patent applications. This means that we have an ever-growing corpus of free knowledge that can be referenced. Copyrighted works sometimes get lost.
-Patents have to be maintained by paying fees; if the fees are not paid the patent goes abandoned and anyone can build the invention. Copyrights can continue as zombies.
With the important caveat that you need to have registered the copyright before the infringement or within three months of publication to get the full benefit of registration, as I understand it.*
*: This is not legal advice or an offer for legal services. Please consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction.
Part of it is that patents don’t just cover copying, but independent creation that happens to infringe. So two people independently have the same idea-the first to file a patent will generally be able to exclude the other, who might not even know about the first. Copyright works differently because it actually requires copying.
The logic is that most patented technology would exist entirely independently of the person who receives the patent-just possibly at a later date. So the cost of giving them a government imposed monopoly is higher (depriving society of free use of a technology that would likely exist either way) while the justification is lower (copyright infringers by definition have copied someone else’s works while a patent infringer merely had the misfortune of not patenting their invention first). That’s not to justify the length of either as plainly both are subject to excessive protections under various circumstances.
And some of this could be better dealt with in other ways. E.g., IMHO, patent law doesn’t take the nonobvious requirement seriously enough.
Agreed on all but the last point, I think patent law takes nonobviousness extremely seriously, it’s just that the USPTO is woefully understaffed / underhoured on the examination front, and on the backend (litigation) it’s a genuinely hard balance to strike (this is probably where credible experts add a lot of value to the system) because it’s not meant to be the same standard as anticipation, but a sufficiently expansive notion of obviousness would invalidate nearly everything ever granted, which would, at a minimum, count as “upsetting the apple cart” and potentially have undesirable downstream effects when it comes to R&D, depending on the field and capital structure.
I don’t think a shorter copyright makes sense for novels. The big money is mostly from movie/TV deals and authors often publish series throughout their life (Hercule Poirot, Pern, Margery Allingham, Darkover, Kate Daniels, Xanath, Sue Grafton’s books, Discworld, Amelia Peabody, the Vorkosigan saga, the Dresden Files, Nancy Drew, GRRM/Rothfuss/Lynch who may eventually finish, etc. etc)
Copyright is essentially the only barrier to publishing writing—Amazon has plenty of self-published works, a few authors sell directly from their websites—and, as someone who read a ton of fanfiction growing up, I’d argue name recognition for either the characters or universe has more of an impact on what people choose to read/purchase than the writing inside.
The first Harry Potter book came out over 20yrs ago now, same for Percy Jackson books, Nix’s Abhorsen series, and Tamara Pierce’s Tortall, all of which continue to be somewhat relevant to young adults today. I don’t think it would truly make sense for Amazon to be able to create a TV show based around those series with all of the hard part done already (name recognition, characters, plot, dialogue) and not pay the author anything.
Because fanfiction, fanart, and to a lesser extent fanfilms, already exist on a massive scale (sites like patron even allow authors to profit though the legality is murkier) . Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey (im)famously started off as fanfiction, but there are plenty of other authors like Naomi Novak and Elizabeth Bear that write fanfiction as well.
I’d also challenge the assertion that authors make most of their money in the first few years though I don’t have the stats to back it up. But if you go to a bookstore, a decent portion on the shelves were probably published over five years ago if not longer.
I'm a copyleft believer. You're free to vacuum up the entire world's supply of copyrighted knowledge and culture for your own product. But then you're not allowed to pull the drawbridge up behind you and start charging people a bunch of money for it while you benefit from IP protections - you have to release your model as open source. Like, ya know, the kind of thing you might do if you named your company OpenAI and set it up as a nonprofit.
Their opposition is irrelevant. The dying gasps of people standing in front of the steamroller of history and saying “stop.”
It’s less that I am totally unsympathetic to their normative position (I don’t agree with it but I at least somewhat get it) so much as I am contemptuous of their inability to read the writing on the wall — this is not a position anyone in the next generation[1] will hold any more than current generations object to photographs for their displacement of portraiture.
[1] assuming AGI doesn’t kill us all in the interim, which by default it will.
Well yes, I certainly agree with this. But I don't think it's a binary -- AI is a tool for humans to use (similar to computer animation). Humans will still make art, but they'll have more advanced tools to do so. Whether you consider that human-made or AI-made is really a semantic question.
It's quite possible. People will always like people stuff. My model here is chess. Computer/AI chess programs far outperform humans, except maybe (occasionally) at the tippy top of human performance. But no one really cares about competition between AI programs. They care about humans competing against each other.
(Similarly, people care a lot about college football and basketball even though the level of quality in the NFL and NBA is much higher.)
This is entirely possible, but you see why that just makes the artists' position even less tenable, right? The more this is true the weaker the argument that it's precluding "artist" as a livelihood, assuming there's an abstract reason that it's important that that be preserved.
They have more power than you think, look at how they effectively killed Udio. Sure, OpenAI and Anthropic might be able to throw them billions of dollars in legal fees and settlements but that’s not true of every lab. Copyright absolutely will kill smaller labs and help monopolize things with the giant tech companies.
Generative AI video is going to reduce the cost of animation by several orders of magnitude (quite literally). Imagine all the talent in the past that we've missed out on because they didn't have access to a major animation studio -- that's not going to really be the case anymore, and that's really exciting.
Will there be a lot of slop? Of course. The invention of the printing press also indirectly led to the publishing of a lot of bad and uninspired books. But I'll always take more bad art if it also means the potential for more good art.
I don’t care about slop. But I do care about artists. Any more orders of magnitude (and there will be many more), and the value of art and human talent drops to zero.
AI may cure cancer, and for this I am genuinely excited. But with generative art I think this is going to be just horrifying for humanity. We might get a windfall for aspiring artists for a couple years, but at some point soon all the most popular art will be made by AI, and art as a human vocation will be gone forever.
AI is enabling way more people to be artists. If you have an idea for a short film it was never practical to shoot it before but now with AI you can. You’re still doing all the creative director work.
Art also isn’t really an interchangeable commodity where more means price goes to zero. People will pay for what they like most whether it’s made by AI or human.
One of my wilder constitutional takes is that Copyright Clause should read that the "limited times" of an "exclusive right" for works should apply only to their "authors and inventors". Barring that, there is always statutory change to implement my take that posthumous copyright protection is bad. The international treaty cited on here is utterly ridiculous too, and it's shame that that's such a big hurdle. It's bad to create a bunch of rent seekers that did nothing to create the work itself that can just sit on the artificial turning of a public good into a club good for any time.
This kind of international treaty is just a clear example of European legal preferences being imposed on the rest of world while they were dominant and a good reason to reform international treaties and orgs to give Global South countries influence proportionate to their economic size today rather than 100+ years ago when these were written.
In this case, I would synthesize the Lost Future/Donald Trump perspective (which I generally oppose and abhor) that "International Law is fake" and "America can and should freely break treaties that it has signed since we're too strong to care about anyone/anything else" to say (paraphrasing Darth Vader) "we're renegotiating the Berne Convention to 14 years from creation [with compulsory licensing], pray we don't alter it further" and let the wisdom of the Founders flourish.
Thanks for the shoutout! As I just noted above, there is literally nothing preventing the US from withdrawing from the Berne Convention. And the increasing trend of European countries trying to bind everyone else into treaty law on a bunch of random things (labor rights etc.) is generally a bad direction for sovereign countries to go down
Why should “Global South” countries be given more influence? They’re almost all basket cases. That statement sounds like a land acknowledgement. America First!
I don't think you read the statement fairly, as much as my kneejerk was to agree with you.
" Global South countries influence proportionate to their economic size today rather than 100+ years ago when these were written."
Consider:
That is, the treaties were written when countries B, C, and D were heavyweights and A, E, F, and G were not. Vowels were small back then, but some of them are bigger and we should take the updated status into account.
Nowadays, the real heavyweights are A, B, C, E, and F, so we should rewrite a bit to take the interest of the vowels (and F) into more account than before
At the very least, they have a better bargaining position now.
I mean, that would probably reduce the influence of Britain and France while increasing the influence of China and India, and that seems bad to me, though sadly more realistic.
Mm, I'm not sure I agree here. An artist should be allowed to sell their copyright to someone else - maybe the copyright is going to guarantee an income stream for 20 years but the artist needs the money right now for something.
Or posthumous - what if I write something amazing but get struck by a bus tomorrow? If I had lived, I could have made a bunch of money to support my family, but if I can't pass the posthumous copyright onto them, then they can't benefit.
To be clear - I'm saying that I should be able to pass on the _remaining_ years of my term onto heirs, not that terms should be Posthumous+50 - the terms should not depend _either way_ on how long I live - neither punishing my family for dying tomorrow nor sitting on my work for 100 years for having written it when I was 20.
Isn't the international treaty mainly pushed by the United States, and forced on other countries? So if the US wants to shorten copyright terms, it doesn't seem like there should be much objection.
This is basically favoring established authors/songwriters over poor ones.
Beyonce can probably self-fund the production costs on her next album and keep ownerships on the copyright, maybe offering a percentage to a label in exchange for help with distribution. An unknown who needs $50k to pay for studio time and session musicians (are those still a thing?) may need to give up the copyrights in exchange for that advance. So now Beyonce gets to profit from her work for longer.
In terms of posthumous claims, I get the intuition around not really caring if the author's great-grandchildren can continue to profit off their works. But should Buddy Holly's widow have been left destitute right after The Day The Music Died? You could have a fixed-rate term, shorter than today, but not have it care whether the original artist is still alive or not.
"Disney, for example, was forced to license various parts of the “Star Wars” universe to other creators, wouldn’t we just end up with an avalanche of horrible “Star War”-related content?"
The House of Mouse already did that without compulsive licensing, bro.
I’m just gonna say it: the thesis of this piece is dumb. You’re going to make cultural output “more dynamic” by making rehashes *easier*? The last two paragraphs give the game away here.
I feel like the author had a disconnected series of thoughts about copyright they wanted to write about here and was looking for some through-line to package them. In this, they have not succeeded—compulsory licenses and a revised regulatory regime for orphan works might be good ideas on their own merits, but as an impetus to orginal IP creation? This ain’t it, chief.
I don’t think the author is only arguing that “rehashes” should be easier - I think they’re also arguing that genuinely new work with mild similarities to what came before (which describes virtually all art) should be easier. See, eg, their comments on litigious rights holders like the Ceelo Green estate. It’s worth remembering here that being sued is costly even if you win.
The litigiousness part of this piece is basically the part of it that is most coherent in support of the claimed thesis, but I think it would need *vastly* more robust information in favor of its causative impact to chalk anything up to it. As an IP lawyer I am extremely skeptical. [ETA: People just don’t live in fear of copyright infringement suits in a way that has a distortative effect on creative works short of wholesale copying, as a practical matter]. Plus you only take a compulsory license *if you know you infringe ex ante* (it can’t be a limitation on ex post damages or you would de facto legalize all but the widest-scale commercial infringement because enforcement wouldn’t make economic sense. A mechanical license for a music cover is in the range of 9 cents (Ed.: looks like 13 cents today, actually)), but that’s a calculus you already have to get right based on the current status quo.
Speaking solely in my pesonal capacity, copyrights seem too long to me (I think 30-50 years fixed term would probably have minimal if any pernicious effects) but there’s no obvious reason to index them to patents — the regimes just aren’t trying to do the same things (in particular “progress” doesn’t clearly mean anything in the arts rather than the sciences.) Patents should probably be guided by the dynamics of the pharma industry which is where I think they are most unambiguously doing what they’re supposed to be doing — I’m not personally in the pharma space so am not going to have the most informed PoV but it’s conceivable that 15 rather than 20 years might be a better regime without precluding economic recovery for drug development, but low confidence in that claim. That said there’s a huge amount of international treaty inertia also implicated by any changes, so easier said than done.
I appreciate your perspective! But I’m a bit skeptical that patents and copyrights are doing different things. I think both are (or perhaps should be) monopolies granted to incentivize production. This doesn’t mean that they can’t have different optimal timelines! But we should be able to point to a difference in, eg, costs of production to justify different timelines.
The trouble is that "costs of production" is sort of meaningless for copyrights (one the one hand, you have however many hundreds of millions of dollars Disney spends on something, on the other hand you have Stephen King in front of a typewriter with variable costs limited to food, ink, and (during certain periods) cocaine). There's probably a much smaller spread for patents, but plenty of costs are ancillary to the patent itself (e.g. you can patent a compound without ex ante awareness of its therapeutic effectiveness) .
I think you put it well in a comment earlier regarding the different valence of moral rights to copyrights vs. patents - "These different rationales for copyright will prescribe different timelines for protection." Copyrights are personal creative works (which we sort of intuitively want to protect independently of maximizing production) where there's at most some sort of forgone hedonic benefit from not having them, but for the most part they aren't in and of themselves taking a chunk out of the publicly exploitable domain (even if you tried your hand at writing something with the exact same plotline as A Tale of Two Cities, without copying it would read nothing like Dickens). Patents, because they aren't indexed to copying -- and because "monotonic progress" is meaningful for them in a way not true of most copyrights (indeed, I think it's debatable if novels even count as part of the "useful Arts" in a constitutional sense -- arts, sure, but "useful?") -- just warrant a fundamentally different cost benefit calculus (and, by extension, a different legal regime).
I think songwriters getting sued for supposedly copying melodies is very unfortunate, but I also don't think any of the people who've been sued were genuinely innovating. The idea that truly creative, paradigm-shifting musicians are thinking "Uh oh, I can't be *too* innovative in case I end up in court" seems to me completely unrealistic and backwards.
I don’t think I agree with this model of how artistic innovation works. I can’t really think of any work of art - including one’s usually considered “innovative” or “paradigm-shifting” - that doesn’t draw inspiration from art that came before it.
Yep. There’s this whole idea in copyright law that stock elements aren’t protectable because that would kill art. What is generic enough to be a stock element? Who knows—go spend millions of dollars litigating about it.
Agreed, but my claim is that the small number of lawsuits over alleged melody-copying aimed at global pop megastars have not in fact led to smaller, more interesting artists thinking "I am now prohibited from drawing inspiration or having influences, so I have no choice but to make a fully licensed rehash."
The idea isn't that it doesn't draw inspiration, it's that drawing inspiration is not in general, and has not been in the past, a source of material risk of facing copyright litigation in the absence of relatively egregious copyright infringement -- rather, its explicitly allowed. Have meritless suits over this kind of thing happened ever? Sure. Is it an acute risk? Not really, no.
One argument I have seen is that De La Soul's 3 feet high and rising contains a ton of unauthorized samples and is clearly great and innovative... if you can borrow work freely perhaps you end up with better stuff than if you have to pay a billion dollars to licnse one song (which you basically end up re-doing, like with Anaconda or Super Freaky Girl)... that said its also the case that De La Soul was a super interesting and talented group coming out with music at an interesting time so it's pretty unlikely you're going to make great music just by changing the laws... idk.
To be honest I really just have a hard time drumming up sympathy for the putative harms to sampling-based songs caused by copyright law. While proponents would argue that it’s an art form being inhibited by copyright, between the entire art form being dominated by one genre of music that I don’t especially care for (everyone else having done fine without it), the availability of licensing, and—most importantly—the fact that the entire art form is premised on deciding that a core part of copyright law (viz., no wholesale copying for commercial exploitation) just doesn’t apply to the people who want to sample, makes me look at its complaints with kind of a jaundiced eye. This isn’t some kind of copyright edge case, this is basically thumbing your nose at the centuries-long legal regime and being shocked, shocked to find that it poses legal difficulties.
I think everything from your comment from “most importantly” on just begs the question, the question being whether copyright law is doing good or harm here.
I understand your point, but I don't think it's vacuous to raise the point "how convenient that you have created a unique art form that requires special pleading relative to the pre-existing regulatory regime and for which you claim licensing is inadequate." Put another way, I think that the 'central point of copyright' (i.e. wholesale copying is not allowed) is clearly load-bearing in a way that sampling undercuts (ETA: or in other words, the cost-benefit analysis comes pre-weighted toward one side) — what’s the principle behind a carve out? Just an expanded notion of fair use?
Compulsory licenses didn't seem completely like a bad idea to me, I haven't thought through implementation though. Like if the international agreement is easier to modify where after 45 years compulsory license occur...how different is that than no more copyright after 45 years?
Basically, I just want to see a ban on terrible country interpolations of actual songs (e.g. "Isn't She Country" by Locash [formerly Locash Cowboys], "Lonely Road" by Jelly Roll and Machine Gun Kelly, etc.).
Covers and interpolations are two different things. An interpolation is basically taking a song, changing a few words and pretending you wrote a new song. Usually somebody writing a cover acknowledges it's a cover (it would take some balls to do otherwise I suppose).
Yeah, covers are often pretty good (see e.g. Toad The Wet Sprocket's cover of "Hey Bulldog"), and the idea is usually to do justice to the original song.
Interpolations *can* be good, especially if the idea is to basically quote a snippet of a song in another song (interpolating just means playing part of one song in another, not necessarily remaking the whole thing). A good friend of mine who's a guitar player used to like to interpolate "While My Guitar Gently Weeps " in "The Best of What's Around" by Dave Matthews Band, because their B sections share similar (same? I don't remember) chord structures.
"Isn't She Country" is technically an interpolation, but it's just basically "Isn't She Lovely" knocked down several intervals (so it's easier to sing) and with absurd lyrics that really shit all over the fact that "Isn't She Lovely" is about Stevie Wonder's newborn daughter.
I was being annoying mostly about my hangup for how I understand words (interpolation seems like the band composed a new song then used an old song to create a second new song between them or used two old songs to create a new one). Where like derivative is like used the old song extensively to create a new one or a sample uses a piece directly but only for a small portion.
Could compulsory licensing be a way around the Berne Convention for more than just music? Yes a work is still technically "under copyright", but if the government declares it must be licensed and sets a government-mandated rate, that's a very different situation.
Mind, I say "get around" but it doesn't even necessarily have to violate the spirit of the Convention if there's an honest attempt to set rates in a way that values the property correctly.
The US could just withdraw from the Berne Convention too, there's nothing preventing that. (I like to say this because I'm a skeptic about the increased trend of binding countries' domestic policies via treaty)
Yea, was wondering that too. Could you have like a two tiered copyright where first 45 years or whatever it prioritizes the artist's control of the work then the back end is allowing them/family compensation (if regulations and behavior don't make that extremely difficult).
Also, speaking of Billy Joel, he has some questions to answer regarding his own originality. We have Billy Charles ("New York State of Mind"), Billy Jagger ("You May Be Right"), Billy McCartney ("Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"), Billy Costello ("It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"), Billy Valli ("For the Longest Time"), Billy Sting ("Running on Ice"), Billy Bowie ("Pressure"), etc. (Note: I can't take credit for these - https://youtu.be/u1TyactU53Q?si=qS1Dvnv6Vr-5gaYr)
Funnily enough my favorite Billy is from his latest (1993!) album - "No Man's Land" slaps - and seems to be Billy playing Billy Joel.
I truly am here for this take. My husband is baffled by my Billy Joel dislike. It started when I was at an impressionable age, when Billy Joel was quite popular, and I first heard Elvis Costello. At that point, I thought, why would I ever listen to Billy Joel again now that I can listen to Elvis?
I will say this about Billy - he's a monster performer. He can sing his own songs live with the same or better energy than on the recording - *in tune* - which is way more than can be said of a lot of contemporary performers.
And his catalog is huge, too - he was putting out almost an album a year between the 70s and 1993. So there are going to be some, um "inspired by" songs in there.
If you're not a Billy Joel fan, then you must simply watch the above video.
I never listened to much Joel growing up, so that might explain why I actually enjoy his music as an adult? Sure, he wasn't terribly original, nor are his lyrics particularly deep. But man can he write a tune, and his progression as an artist through the 70s/80s had a nice sweep to it. Sure you could just listen to someone like Elton John instead. But why not both?
There's something that just seemed fundamentally "uncool" about Billy Joel, at least as we got, I dunno, into the early aughts? He had obviously been an enormously successful pop star with something approaching a two decade long run of reliable hitmaking. Not sure why he became "uncool" — perhaps by the late 90s his music just came across as overly earnest, or sentimental? And there was a quality drop off, I guess, as he moved deep into the 1980s. But pretty much everybody suffers from that.
But I'd say maybe enough time has passed for something of a Billy Joel reputational reassessment to have occurred. And if you just look at his catalogue (or rather, listen to it) out of context, there's really some excellent stuff there. Some of his songwriting approaches the level of polish and sophistication of, say, John-Taupin or Steely Dan. I appreciate him a lot more than I did 20 years ago.
I don't *hate* Billy Joel's music, but it's definitely not something I'm going to prioritize. The only exception of a song of his that I will listen to regularly, because I enjoy history, is how damn catchy We Didn't Start The Fire is.
Oh, believe me, I get it. For instance, the existence of the deeply terrible country interpolations I mention above offends me in a pretty profound way.
Sorry, spelled it wrong - it's interpolation, not interlopation.
But in any case, interpolating means quoting part of a song in another song. It can range from just snippets - jazz musicians do this a lot - to "quoting" an entire song and changing aspects of it so that it's now technically a new song, as with these terrible country interpolations.
On the topic of movies & TV shows, what's really caused a rise in sequels and IP re-licensing (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) is just the rise of enhanced competition with the Internet. In the 90s the movie industry faced very little competition for people's time and attention, so wealthy film lovers could finance artistic vanity projects. With far, far more screen entertainment vying for attention today, it makes movie financing much more conservative. Why finance a new artsy movie when you could make another Star Wars or whatever?
That, plus the death of Blockbuster greatly reduced the longterm income stream studios can get from a given movie. Netflix et al pay quite a bit less over the life of a movie than renting it out repeatedly at Blockbuster ever did. This again incentivizes conservativeness- only fund what you know will be a hit (Marvel, Star Wars). I'd also throw in increased foreign competition- American movie studios in the 90s were in a super-dominant position globally that they aren't today
The article gets the economics backward. Monopoly pricing reduces consumption because consume more of the cheap or free option than the expensive one.
Biopics can certainly generate demand for back-catalog works, but that effect actually cuts against the author’s thesis: investors have to spend heavily to manufacture demand precisely because the underlying works are locked up and costly to use. If copyright terms were 20 years, everything before 11/24/2005 would be public domain. Gladiator would stream for pennies. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone could be freely remixed, reshot, redistributed. Studios and streamers would race to use that cheap IP, and consumption of old culture would explode. If terms were life plus fifty years there would be modest demand growth for public domain works but wouldn’t change much.
Thanks for featuring me! I love talking about how to make copyright work better for artists and think it’s an especially important issue in the age of AI.
Excellent work, thank you.
I think the switch to streaming media has to be a big part of this discussion. Back in the olden days, if you really liked something, you bought the album. I've got CDs I bought as a kid in the 90s, the money changed hands back then, and that was that. Occasionally I dust one off and play it, but no further revenue is generated, they can't even harvest data that I did it for their algorithms. But with streaming, someone gets paid every time a song is played, no matter how old. This makes popular back catalogs very valuable.
This is a really good point--IP holders want to make you rent their works instead of buying them if they can get away with it. It's a good reason to hold onto those physical copies if one can.
Actually this is about technology making copying so easy that if they didn’t “rent” the works, they would sell one or two copies and go broke as was feared with the early file sharing apps. Back in the days when people bought records was when having a hit could make someone rich overnight, and record companies had money to burn. Back when you had to buy a newspaper, reporters and journalists could make a reasonably secure living, and the owners of the publications could make a considerable profit from it.
I find it hard to believe they are extracting more money from me paying $12 a month to spotify than me buying multiple $12 CDs a month.
Streaming is basically casual music fans subsidizing hardcore ones. If you bought 3 CDs a year in 1996 and otherwise just flipped between the three stations you liked, paying $132 a year for Spotify may be less appealing (though you might be OK with the free tier). If you bought $500 a year in obscure vinyl in 1996, paying a quarter of that for unlimited access to essentially all commercially released music in human history is an incredible bargain.
Well - if total cost is lower - as in e.g. unsold CDs which are a physical good cost, all the logistics and storage around those - and a broader stable revenue stream is achieved, it seems likely that the net revenue is better.
Back in the day the labels had an incentive to forcibly turn over what was popular... now I think we are learning that left to their own devices people will listen to the same thing for 3-5 years where the "CD" model you were trying to cycle new stuff in every 2 months.
This reminds me of a comment I saw approx. 25 years ago or so about Top 40 vs. Classic Rock radio (sadly, I can't remember who wrote it):
I know it's popular to hate Top 40 radio because it plays the same thing over and over. But while you'll hear the new Christina Aguilera single 10 times a day, every day, that will only be for two months. Then it will be replaced by the new Good Charlotte single, which will be played 10 times a day, every day, for two months, and then it will be replaced by the new Avril Lavigne single, etc., etc. Whereas with Classic Rock, you'll hear Boston's "More than a Feeling" 10 times a day, every day, for the next 30 years.
if you have satellite radio the appeal of the top 40 format becomes even more clear. Even the "indie" station is a top 40 station, they just have a rotation of 20 classic indie songs (Pavement/Radiohead/Arcade Fire/Wolf Parade) and 20 new ones (MJ Lenderman/Wet Leg).
I do have SiriusXM and find this really frustrating. I still think it's better than terrestrial radio but not by much.
I think its better because there is a lot less talking during AM commute time. But the playlist is no better and maybe even worse. As a real Alt-Country/dad rock enjoyer the "Outlaw Country" station is essentially the definition of "mid..." isn't outlaw country supposed to be at least nominally a risk-taking genre? So much forgettable music with a southern accent.
Alas, Orwell's "1984" is still copyright protected in the US (but, ironically, not the UK) because I have my revised O'Brien quote to Winston Smith in the can and ready to go: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine Boston's 'More than a Feeling' playing in your ear —forever."
A huge chunk of the CD boom was labels monetizing their back catalog and reissuing everything onto the new CD format. Classic rock, oldies, and the "70's, 80's, 90's and beyond" radio formats have always been popular. I'm not sure we're seeing anything now that hasn't been true for 50+ years at this point.
(One exception to that is the success streamers are having with AI-generated material populating background listening playlists. The horrifying reality may be that many people don't really care about what they listen to at all.)
I think the fact that Taylor Swift has essentially been the dominant commercial force in music since 1989 (11 years) is a HUGE difference with the 80s and 90s. Yes old stuff would come back. But the life cycle of a pop act (broadly construed, also including rap, r & b and popular rock music) was dramatically shorter in the pre-streaming age.
I don't know, I could point to U2, Michael Jackson, and Madonna all having that sort of dominance; I think they, like Swift, are just outliers in that regard. If anything, I think the change has been a compression where attention goes only to a few top acts, while it's the middle-charting bands and performers that struggle to make a career out of their music.
I agree that the middle class is eroding for sure. That said I think if you look at the 80s Madonna and Michael Jackson were huge but they were not nearly as much bigger than the next biggest acts than Taylor is now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Top_Artist The music industry was bigger overall so they were probably more culturally significant, but relative to other artists the gap was smaller (this overlaps also with Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, and George Michael).
Another thing you don't see in nearly the same way is artists with extremely short but extremely high peaks... Shania Twain for example had two megahit records in '95 and '97 (up in '02 was huge as well but was five years later and there was nothing between). Or 50 cent who was basically the dominant musical act for a single year.
Michael was only releasing an album every 4 years, hard to dominate each year in that scenario. Taylor is far more prolific.
The short high peaks thing also still happens. Justin Bieber is a Shania Twain analogue. Olivia Rodrigo might end up being the 50 Cent equivalent depending.
Agreed. The Beatles were dominant for nearly a decade. The Stones were a major force for much longer than that. Ditto the other acts you cite. And today's pop scene features its share of one hit wonders.
The Beatles had 7 years (Taylor is in Year 12). The Stones were second-tier by the mid-70s even though they were famous. I do think Taylor's reign is longer. But it's also important to note that from 2017-2019 she was seen as washed up/kind of a joke. She has more of a rare dual-peak career like Aerosmith.
Part of the issue is that the entire pop music ecosystem was reinvented in the late 1950s - “oldies” has never really gone older than that, and still goes back to nearly that point today, just with more decades included.
Of course, we're as far from the 1950s innovation as those artists were from the artists of the 1880s.
Yes, this is the point I keep bringing up about alleged stagnation in popular (broadly defined) music -- you need to invent a new genre of music that basically kills all demand for the prior dominant genres among new consumers in the same manner that the introduction of rock & roll in the 1950s all but completely cut off interest in older forms of popular music among people born post-1935 or so.
I haven’t read a good history, but I assume that’s the advent of radio in cars and music as a lo-fi broadcast form. C.f. Bing Crosby as a pop artist who sang for the recording microphone, as opposed to his peers who sang for the crowd in front of them.
Music really sucked before 1960.
Only a few things from the 1940s are any good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAq-xvYtOns
About half of this list from the 1950s is tolerable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJz_yrxJ9mU
The 1960s list is much better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHk77-bhw5Q
Although I would rather be stuck listening to that 1940s and 1950s playlist than experience 5 seconds of that Nicki Minaj video.
"The horrifying reality may be that many people don't really care about what they listen to at all."
not per se horrifying.... I am borderline music indifferent and while it makes me without doubt a cultural heathen, unwashed masses....
"Liked" for the accuracy of many of your observations here (I've said for years that the historical impermanence of recording media combined with introduction of new recording formats was papering over the "dead hand" (dead throat?) issue that music is facing now), but I disagree with the "horrifying" part. The toleration (if not enjoyment) of AI-generated music for background listening is simply finally making undeniable that which music elitists have frothingly denied for decades despite its self-evident truth -- the average person really doesn't give a $h!t in most instances about the creator(s) of the music.
Wouldn't people just listen to more old stuff if it was royalty-free? I could set up a discount streaming service and just pump it out all day.
yeah for sure. there's no clear way to change the current paradig,m
It’s also killed off the influence of elite tastemakers. Ironically, that means less unique and innovative sounds because the algorithm chases predictable success. And the best predictors for an algorithm are similarities to past success.
Yes, bring back the snobbish gatekeepers!
I actually mean this pretty unironically, having moonlighted as a snobbish gatekeeper in the past.
Right - and these older songs are well-represented on playlists that will generate streams for the owner even if few people are actively choosing to listen to that artist. So these can be stable revenue even if they’re recognizable only from a particular occasion’s playlist. Makes me wonder how much the copyright issue plays into the encroachment of Christmas music into October!
Let’s keep the focus on attorneys. We have too many of them and their mindset has way too much influence in the Democratic Party, per various other Slow Boring posts. The concerns in this one are just an example.
I am an attorney, and 100% agree. But how do we reduce the influence of attorneys?
I'm of the mind that attorneys are a symptom, not a cause.
1. The US (and the other FIVE EYES countries) have been very stable for a long time. This means they've been able to build up significant regulatory states that encourage intellectual efforts to go to law.
2. The UK-derived common law system and adversarial processes encourage use of lawyers.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, a catchphrase for career was “doctor, lawyer, Indian chief”. Law is a default path for far too many affluent kids who are good at school. We can erode that by arguing against it. Jennifer Pahlka is working on changing our culture around legislating from emphasizing texts to emphasizing outcomes[1]. Then there is the abundance movement, which is in part a prestige shift from law / “policy” to construction and project management.
[1] https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/outcomes-reviews-realigning-legislative
There's something going on here though that a lot of analysts are missing...
Why has China totally stopped converging with the U.S. (and in fact gone backwards) when they are training way more scientists and engineers while we continue to have a ton of lawyers and finance people. On some level I do see the issues with the overly regulated u.s. economy. On another level though our topline economic numbers are pretty incredible so I think analysts should have a hard look at this... I think any admonition that we are seriously fucking up should be accompanied by an acknowledgment that we are doing a lot right. And if we change things we don't want to lose all the good things we're doing.
Probably nothing to be gained by talking people out of the law. The people choosing it will otherwise go into finance or working to build the next B2B SaaS tech stack. We’ve sorta stopped pushing people to doing anything actually useful in this country.
"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." It's right there in the Constitution that IP is not granted out of fairness or the interests of ensuring great great great grandchildren can make money for nothing, it's to promote progress of the arts and sciences. Patents are their own issue, but it's clear current copyright law no longer even considers progress as a factor.
Right. The founders believed creators and inventors had no natural right to benefit from the fruits of their creations and inventions. None whatsoever.
So copyrights and patents were intentionally designed to create rights that creators and inventors don't actually deserve or have any moral claim to. The whole point was to give creators something they're not entitled to solely as a trade off that the founders believed would enhance public welfare overall by encouraging more creation and invention.
So really, copyright and patents should extend no longer than what's needed to create an adequate/optimal incentive. Considering how discounted cash flow analysis works, that's probably 25-40 years at the absolute maximum. Beyond that, the present value of those far out future cash flows is essentially zero and provides no incentive to creators and inventors.
There's a power-law issue here, where for the overwhelmingly vast majority of works, all or essentially all of the profits are made in the first 10 or 20 years, but for the tiny minority of works that retain mass appeal beyond then, the majority of the profits come late in the life cycle of the work. The law is designed to hoard those late profits for the handful of super-successful works at the cost of massive underutilization of middling works. It's maddening.
Totally agree with your last paragraph.
Patents are already limited to a term of 20 years from the date of filing, which is extended only in a few circumstances (delay at the USPTO, sometimes delays in government approvals for medical products).
I love to see this topic get some attention. I think it's a bigger problem than we realize and I think about it all the time. I'd love to see libraries and streaming services of works that the creators have voluntarily made more accessible. I think there is plenty of excellent art going unnoticed and I'd be glad to turn my attention toward less close-fisted artists if there were a way for me to do that.
20 years is too short, but life + 75 is way too long.
I'd like to just see a flat time frame. I'll go with 50 years. The most important thing is to build a coalition for such a timeframe rather than let people spend all their time trying to change that number a little bit.
Patent attorney here! I'm glad to see someone point to Article I, Section 8. And I agree strongly that while the patent system has some issues, copyright is a complete mess.
I actually think that copyright would benefit enormously from working more like patents, with a much shorter term and requirement that a copy of the copyrighted work be provided to the USPTO within a short period of public release. The USPTO should make all copyrighted works available after 20 years.
EDIT: I would also require maintenance fees for copyrights.
Except for Calvin and Hobbes, so long as he never goes after the meme groups that creatively mix and make new strips from the old for free
If it’s satire and non-commercial, it probably works fine under fair use.
I mean, if all of the urinating on automotive logos have been able to sustain themselves...
Copyright is also a restriction on free speech (which is why the Constitution has to call out an exception) but we've abandoned our principles to adopt European moral rights nonsense. Can someone whisper in Trump's ear about this?
Nitpick: the Copyright Clause is part of the original Constitution, while the Free Speech Clause is of course in the later First Amendment.
Haha I wondered if someone would say that.
We Slow Borers are always reliable for being nitpickers!
Death of the creator seems like a weird milestone for the IP timeline. It may have made sense way back when, but in an era when you can sell your catalog to someone else, it’s very odd that its value depends on your physical health. When terms last many decades after your death, maybe that doesn’t mean a lot, but if we shorten the terms, it will matter more. Fifty years from first publication sounds right to me, regardless of circumstances.
It would at least make sense for the clock to start running as soon as the rights are sold. So when Springsteen sells his catalog, it's the equivalent, for copyright purposes, of his death.
All those “death of creator” clauses will get really weird if life extension works out (or mind uploading, or cryonics, or a number of other things).
I would go with life of the creator (so long as they own the material) or 50 years from publication, which ever is longer.
I’m not sure I entirely buy this. Basic growth theory (e.g. recent Nobel laureates Romer, Aghion, and Howitt) suggests that IP protections usually incentivize innovation.
There’s an important consideration that this article leaves out: if you do manage to create successful new IP, you make a shitload of money. The main argument that the author uses to wave this away is a sort of “lump of capital” fallacy: if investing in old IP is profitable, then there are fewer resources available to invest in new IP. In the short run, these industries may be slow to adjust in size, but you’d certainly expect them to massively expand in the long run if there were hugely profitable prospects lying around. I therefore suspect that there’s something fundamentally unprofitable about new IP rather than “crowding out” from existing IP. (These IP protections have existed for a long time. Why is culture only stagnating now?)
(Note: there are other arguments about why IP protections may harm innovation, but none of them are present here. The one thing I found interesting and convincing was the bit about litigation.)
A different theory: we are indeed seeing massive cultural innovation, but we no longer have a mass culture. It’s not profitable to invest in new movies, but there’s tons of money and dynamism in podcasting, streaming, etc. However, everyone is siloed off into their own little corner of culture, so it’s hard for anyone to see how much dynamism there actually is.
Basic economic theory says yes IP protection incentizes.
That is not the same as saying that permanently ever extending IP protection well beyond the lifespan of the creator or creating parties (the actual humans) ipso facto incentizes innovation. The contrary, in general in economics we recognise that any such items always reach points of diminshing and even negative returns.
Stagnation may be developing as the longer-term effect of the particularly extremely long
protections adjustment effects (rather of the same kind that tariffs didn't immediately feed through to inflation but one now is starting to see the adjustments).
I haven't a strong opinion overall (and don't particularly care if culture may be stagnating or not), but your critique is quite itself flawed from economics pov.
To be clear, I agree with this comment, and indeed in most models of growth, maximal IP protections are suboptimal. (I pointed this out in my original comment as well.)
What I was trying to say is that this article somehow didn’t even address the elephant in the room (the fact that there are huge profits on the table for new entrants), and it misses most of the usual counterarguments about why maximal IP protections can be bad. The argument that the article does provide is flawed.
“IP protections are harming innovation” is a big claim that deserves better support.
I mean, isn't the crowding out as much about the consumption/demand side as the production side. Excessively long IP protection seems to be shifting investment from creation to sales and marketing efforts.
That results in older creations capturing an outsized share of demand for creative works. This saps demand for new creations so we get less of them.
"
“IP protections are harming innovation” is a big claim that deserves better support
"
That wasn't the claim
The claim was that excessively long IP protections were harming innovation
I'd like to see some proof that a, say, 50 year protection creates a lot more innovation than, say, a 90 year protection.
Ah I will grant readily the flaws potential.
For movies the argument is usually a combination of audience shifts (simpler, action-heavy, non-writing dependent plots play more easily overseas), lack of DVD sales meaning that the optimization pressures have to be specifically for tentpole releases that make their money in their theatrical runs, and extremely large capital outlays making everyone more risk averse such that you end up with a “missing middle” of the kind of films that characterize a lot of the output of the 1990s.
(Of course, that’s not getting into less straightforwardly causative aspects like competition from other forms of entertainment and the theatre experience turning to garbage between obscene prices and smartphones.)
The theatre experience seems so much better than before, I think. Movie theaters didn’t even start to put in stadium seating until I was a late teenager. Not to mention there’s IMAX, partial or full, at a lot of theatres. The prices are high, but it makes it less crowded.
I don’t see movies in the theatres much because streaming is so good (and I tend to prefer series to movies). And because not much stuff comes out that I want to see. Third reason is the prices, though a movie is cheaper than most other forms of entertainment around me even now. But it’s always fun when I do go.
Seating I'll give you, but experience? Last time I went to a Regal they had *25 fucking minutes* of ads and trailers (trailers being, of course, also ads) past the posted start time before the damn movie started without no indication of an *actual* start time to let you skip it. *I* am paying *them* money to be provided a service, not to have my valuable time wasted while being treated like a product. The volume levels on "Furiosa" were at *literally* painful levels, and over all of this is the spectre of the fucking phones ruining the whole thing without recourse to violence and property destruction as the warranted correctives.
Yeah, I’m on record for banning all ads everywhere
General ticket prices have generally matched inflation. Premium movie experiences (like IMAX) are, duh, more expensive.
Even for the non-premium formats, the technology (and the theaters) are far more comfortable than previously, as you note. So one could argue that ticket prices really haven't gone up that much. Given the falling popularity of movies, that's pretty much what we should expect.
My perception of prices, like everyone else’s, is based on nominal prices when I was 16 lol
When a movie ticket was like 80% of your weekly income.
They were like $8 then. And we grumbled
Which is about the same percentage of actual minimum wage (no one is actually paying $7.25 now, even McDonalds in Mississippi) as today
And yeah, if I’m going to a movie, if it’s an action movie I definitely spring for the full IMAX. There’s a really nice one in the science museum here that was great for Dune. They even had the haptics so you felt your chair vibrate when the ornithopters were around
I think the switch to demanding a movie play on multiple screens if you wanted to show the movie at all was more important, tbh.
What?
IP protections in the real world hinder innovation on net especially combined with how the US legal system works. There are probably dozens of trolls for every legitimate IP complaint and it can cost millions of dollars to litigate one of these even if you win, and the bounds of IP are quite vague when it comes to what’s too similar so there’s no guarantee of winning even if the case is unreasonable, discouraging people from building on what came before. In the most innovative sector of our economy (AI) the leading labs have openly sworn off using patents offensively, yet this hasn’t stopped innovation in AI, nor has the non-protectability of inventions and works created with AI deterred people from using AI; if anything copyright laws are the biggest threat to AI innovation.
There's clearly something to your theory, but it still doesn't seem great if we're entering a world where the vast majority of creative products which aim to reach a wide audience are drawing on long established IP.
I think you can argue that there's only really so much space for the biggest works. How many multi-hundred million dollar films or video games is there market demand for each year? Probably no more than the low double digits each. If most such projects that are greenlit use established IP that inevitably narrows the space for new ideas and stories.
Of course in some sense it's wonderful that an independent developer or streamer can make content that sells to a few thousand people and make it living off it, but those types of works don't replace the impact and influence of new works that aim to reach a mass audience.
And I think on "why didn't this happen until now?" the answer might be as simple as that it's only relatively recently (the last couple of decades) that publishers sussed out how to optimise revenue from the existing mass of creative IP. Partly due to technology and market developments making this more possible and effective (digital distribution etc.), but also partly just general ignorance of how to build and exploit IP effectively - even something as mammoth as Star Wars lay largely unexploited for nearly two decades after the original trilogy (1977 - 1983); licensing established IP to make major video game productions has only really taken off in the past 15 years.
People will not go to the movie theater to see a low or mid budget movie. Thus, studios have to swing big with huge budget extravagances. Added to that is that there are no surefire stars that will bring people to the theater. Because so much money is at stake, studios will be inherently conservative, and err (or profit!) in the direction of what has worked before (no more John Carter's).
I feel like videogames have nothing remotely like stagnation going on — have you checked out Expedition 33?
That game was great and it deserves whatever awards it wins - but it was also a 'AA' game (not the huge budget of a AAA game).
In the indie / smaller game space you can definitely find a variety of games(I also loved Blue Prince from last year)
I'd say a few things here:
1) Games are (generally) much less likely to yell at each other about "copying" gameplay elements. Nintendo patented a few things recently which irk me, but traditionally games have been less litigious about borrowing elements. Heck, Blizzard's rise was partly on doing super-polished versions of game ideas others explored first (RTS, Rogue-like, MMO).
2) Indie helps too - and I think if you went to listen to indie music with smaller bands you'd probably still get interesting stuff, although interesting doesn't mean "will like it" (For instance I know some people really hated the parry/dodge part of Expedition 33, and complaints about how RNG-heavy Blue Prince gets at the end are fair)
Sometimes an indie band/game really breaks through (Expedition 33 and Blue Prince also received excellent press coverage, and both were also available on XBox GamePass) - but the ones that break through are more likely to be the innovative ones - so a bit of selection bias.
3) Plenty of games can feel 'derivative' without having the IP issue - look how many "extraction shooters" keep coming out. You may not notice for the indie ones but I definitely see this trend among AAA games.
So... I think this is partly a real phenomenon (where games feel free to take good elements from other games and mix-and-match without arguments about 'sampling' - although games that really _do_ get too derivative do get panned), and partly a selection bias issue where you may be more familiar with games/discoverability of games.
Expedition 33 being an AA game is just fucking crazy to me. The final Act II boss fight alone is more graphically sumptuous than entire indie games. And the game's fucking huge! (Arguably too huge to the point it kinds throws off the pacing in Act III, which is where I was reminded of why my general preference for linear over open-world narratives exists.)
It's definitely on the high end of AA games but they only had about 35 "core" team members (there's a bunch of IMO stupid discourse insisting that their team was much larger because you need to count e.g., every musicion who played on their score. I quite liked the score and music (especially the mansion theme) but someone who contributed 80 _hours_ of work on the game is not even in the same ballpark as someone who put 80 _weeks_ of work into the game, and AAA games, even counting outsourcers, often have lots of outsourcers who have individually put at least half a year into a game.)
Sure, could you imagine if, say, “fast travel” in a video game had been copyrighted?
I very much have, as well as the (incredible) Hollow Knight: Silksong - between them the two best games I've played this year. But these kinds of productions are the (very welcome) exception, not the rule. The world of big budget video games has been characterised by ever more remakes, sequels and remasters, with the same designs, IP and characters being used over and over again. And this is entirely understandable from the publishers' point of view, because more and more gaming hours - especially among the under 20s - are being taken up by "forever games" Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft (plus, to a lesser extent, Madden, CoD and GTA Online), so one of the few ways that bigger projects can be sure of at least some attention is to draw on the appeal of established brands and characters.
Several big publishers have recently made it very clear they intend to focus on core high value IP to the exclusion of everything else - and given how much pressure they are under, I think their decisions make a lot of sense (as depressing as it is).
I do think it is very true to say there's more innovation and creativity in mass market games than in movies at present, but whether there's as much as seen between, say, 1995 and 2010, I find doubtful.
TBF Silksong is an (excellent) sequel itself.
Some of this is real, like the fact that cultural innovation is in new formats like podcast and short video.
But other bits of this assume a kind of market rationality that is never a great model of creative artistic production by individuals. Extending copyright increases financial incentives, but individual artists (as opposed to corporate creators like movie studios) are not especially sensitive to the potential long run gambles, the way they are to short term financial incentives, and all the non-financial incentives of reputation and creativity.
But I think my point works even if creativity isn't sensitive to financial incentives.
Suppose the arrival rate of new ideas is constant. So, every year, studios have the same number of directors/writers coming to them with new pitches. If IP protection is going to yield high profits in the future, wouldn't studios want to pursue more of these projects rather than fewer?
What the author says is that old projects suck up financial resources that would be directed towards new projects. My point was that the "crowding out" the author gestures at seems weak to me, since the industry can expand in the long run if studios really could earn exorbitant returns on new IP.
Studio films are far more likely to be sensitive to financial incentives than most art, because they are mostly produced by big corporations that have financialized motives.
Record labels are relevant for popular music, but don't control it as much as studios control filmmaking and television, and for other art forms like novels, poetry, painting, and shorter format streaming video, there's much more direct control by individual artists, who find a lot of their incentives come from non-financial directions (and who don't have the awareness to deal with long-run expected value calculations).
Ok, sure, there are sectors where the financial incentives don't matter as much. But then how do we explain the data for novels/poetry/painting etc.? If these are simply insensitive to financial incentives, how could IP protections explain the (claimed) stagnation at all? (I'm actually not sure these sectors have stagnated -- have they?)
This definitely seems like a much more interesting set of questions to me!
Patent terms are 20 years—it seems strange to give so much more generous terms to art/music/literature than to patents, which are in theory for useful inventions. I guess it’s because they are useful that we see the obvious problem in restricting access for longer? That said I don’t think anything particularly bad would happen if copyrights were 20 years from the time of publication. Most artists struggle and if they make anything off their novel it’s probably going to happen in the first few years, so we’re really just arguing about whether the successful stars/writers are rich or megarich. I love the compulsory licensing idea as well.
I think many people consider a work of art to be something deeply (spiritually?) significant to an artist. There’s a JK Rowling quote about how she hates fan-fiction because she thinks of her characters as her children.
Imagine someone saying this about patented work like a drug of a piece of machinery. It would sound ridiculous! But saying it about art is par for the course. I think this is why AI art/copyright infringement has drawn such ire, why death of the artist remains a popular copyright timeline benchmark, and why you see people in these comments suggesting timelines like 50 years instead of 20.
Edit: To be abundantly clear, my point here is this. All of us economics nerds at slow boring might like to think of copyrights as limited monopolies granted to incentivize production. But a lot of people see them as more than that, because they see artists as having certain moral rights over their creation. These different rationales for copyright will prescribe different timelines for protection.
JK Rowling was/is unusually accepting of fanfiction—that quote was chiefly related to fanfic erotica and how she wouldn’t read it.
Patents are also more likely to be related to corporate work—I do have a couple of patents, but reading through the lawyerese that the description and claims turned into (I did get to write the examples at least) I’m often more embarrassed by them than anything.
Oh man reading patents is no fun. What grinds my gears is the way patent holders deliberately make their patents hard to search for so you will violate them so they can sue you later, at least in the industry where I had to do this.
I have never heard of anyone deliberately making patents difficult to find. In fact, it's common for patent holders to advertise the fact that their patents cover some of their products.
I saw it in my field. Using very weird wording and even British spellings on keywords to make them hard to search for. It made it more likely we would go on a track in our research that would ultimately be foreclosed because it was already patented (which may have been the real ulterior motive, to delay competition)
"There’s a JK Rowling quote about how she hates fan-fiction because she thinks of her characters as her children."
See also Gene Roddenberry's views on non-canon works. The Great Bird had some pretty specific ideas about what his universe should be like, especially during the TNG era.
"Imagine someone saying this about patented work like a drug of a piece of machinery. It would sound ridiculous!"
Why is it ridiculous? I could imagine inventors being very attached to their inventions.
I thought it was the other way around! I.e. we thought we needed short patent terms precisely because we want inventions to be copied and disseminated fairly quickly so the whole world can take advantage of them, and especially so that other inventors can combine it with other technology to keep progress going. Whereas with copyright it doesn't matter if no one can sell a story as their own for a long time (not like people are going to starve or die of disease because they didn't have access to an existing novel or song).
I've written about this up-thread. I'm a US patent attorney, and I think we would benefit from copyrights working much more like patents.
-Patents get a term of 20 years from date of filing; extensions are limited and documented on the front page of the patent. This is a reasonable term, and fairly easy to calculate.
-Patents have to be filed with the USPTO within a very limited time of public release of the invention. Copyrights don't have to be filed right now.
-The USPTO publishes patents and patent applications. This means that we have an ever-growing corpus of free knowledge that can be referenced. Copyrighted works sometimes get lost.
-Patents have to be maintained by paying fees; if the fees are not paid the patent goes abandoned and anyone can build the invention. Copyrights can continue as zombies.
Re: - "Copyrights don't have to be filed right now." Isn't registration a requirement to do anything with a CR?
Registration is required to sue for copyright infringement. But a copyright can be registered after the work is created and released.
With the important caveat that you need to have registered the copyright before the infringement or within three months of publication to get the full benefit of registration, as I understand it.*
*: This is not legal advice or an offer for legal services. Please consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction.
Part of it is that patents don’t just cover copying, but independent creation that happens to infringe. So two people independently have the same idea-the first to file a patent will generally be able to exclude the other, who might not even know about the first. Copyright works differently because it actually requires copying.
That’s an interesting distinction, but in my mind doesn’t really provide a rationale as to why copyright terms should be ~5x longer.
The logic is that most patented technology would exist entirely independently of the person who receives the patent-just possibly at a later date. So the cost of giving them a government imposed monopoly is higher (depriving society of free use of a technology that would likely exist either way) while the justification is lower (copyright infringers by definition have copied someone else’s works while a patent infringer merely had the misfortune of not patenting their invention first). That’s not to justify the length of either as plainly both are subject to excessive protections under various circumstances.
And some of this could be better dealt with in other ways. E.g., IMHO, patent law doesn’t take the nonobvious requirement seriously enough.
Agreed on all but the last point, I think patent law takes nonobviousness extremely seriously, it’s just that the USPTO is woefully understaffed / underhoured on the examination front, and on the backend (litigation) it’s a genuinely hard balance to strike (this is probably where credible experts add a lot of value to the system) because it’s not meant to be the same standard as anticipation, but a sufficiently expansive notion of obviousness would invalidate nearly everything ever granted, which would, at a minimum, count as “upsetting the apple cart” and potentially have undesirable downstream effects when it comes to R&D, depending on the field and capital structure.
Weren't some of the aforementioned music copyright lawsuits about fairly basic musical elements that could've been created independently?
I don’t think a shorter copyright makes sense for novels. The big money is mostly from movie/TV deals and authors often publish series throughout their life (Hercule Poirot, Pern, Margery Allingham, Darkover, Kate Daniels, Xanath, Sue Grafton’s books, Discworld, Amelia Peabody, the Vorkosigan saga, the Dresden Files, Nancy Drew, GRRM/Rothfuss/Lynch who may eventually finish, etc. etc)
Copyright is essentially the only barrier to publishing writing—Amazon has plenty of self-published works, a few authors sell directly from their websites—and, as someone who read a ton of fanfiction growing up, I’d argue name recognition for either the characters or universe has more of an impact on what people choose to read/purchase than the writing inside.
The first Harry Potter book came out over 20yrs ago now, same for Percy Jackson books, Nix’s Abhorsen series, and Tamara Pierce’s Tortall, all of which continue to be somewhat relevant to young adults today. I don’t think it would truly make sense for Amazon to be able to create a TV show based around those series with all of the hard part done already (name recognition, characters, plot, dialogue) and not pay the author anything.
Because fanfiction, fanart, and to a lesser extent fanfilms, already exist on a massive scale (sites like patron even allow authors to profit though the legality is murkier) . Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey (im)famously started off as fanfiction, but there are plenty of other authors like Naomi Novak and Elizabeth Bear that write fanfiction as well.
I’d also challenge the assertion that authors make most of their money in the first few years though I don’t have the stats to back it up. But if you go to a bookstore, a decent portion on the shelves were probably published over five years ago if not longer.
This piece lends credence to my position that artists who are opposed to AI on copyright grounds stand in the way of progress.
I'm a copyleft believer. You're free to vacuum up the entire world's supply of copyrighted knowledge and culture for your own product. But then you're not allowed to pull the drawbridge up behind you and start charging people a bunch of money for it while you benefit from IP protections - you have to release your model as open source. Like, ya know, the kind of thing you might do if you named your company OpenAI and set it up as a nonprofit.
Their opposition is irrelevant. The dying gasps of people standing in front of the steamroller of history and saying “stop.”
It’s less that I am totally unsympathetic to their normative position (I don’t agree with it but I at least somewhat get it) so much as I am contemptuous of their inability to read the writing on the wall — this is not a position anyone in the next generation[1] will hold any more than current generations object to photographs for their displacement of portraiture.
[1] assuming AGI doesn’t kill us all in the interim, which by default it will.
I'm willing to bet that people will continue to pay a premium for art that has been made by humans well into the future.
Well yes, I certainly agree with this. But I don't think it's a binary -- AI is a tool for humans to use (similar to computer animation). Humans will still make art, but they'll have more advanced tools to do so. Whether you consider that human-made or AI-made is really a semantic question.
It's quite possible. People will always like people stuff. My model here is chess. Computer/AI chess programs far outperform humans, except maybe (occasionally) at the tippy top of human performance. But no one really cares about competition between AI programs. They care about humans competing against each other.
(Similarly, people care a lot about college football and basketball even though the level of quality in the NFL and NBA is much higher.)
This is entirely possible, but you see why that just makes the artists' position even less tenable, right? The more this is true the weaker the argument that it's precluding "artist" as a livelihood, assuming there's an abstract reason that it's important that that be preserved.
They have more power than you think, look at how they effectively killed Udio. Sure, OpenAI and Anthropic might be able to throw them billions of dollars in legal fees and settlements but that’s not true of every lab. Copyright absolutely will kill smaller labs and help monopolize things with the giant tech companies.
And while it's obviously anti-progress, it's also anti-art.
Being able to sample and borrow and iterate is fundamental to creativity.
“Progress”
Generative AI video is going to reduce the cost of animation by several orders of magnitude (quite literally). Imagine all the talent in the past that we've missed out on because they didn't have access to a major animation studio -- that's not going to really be the case anymore, and that's really exciting.
Will there be a lot of slop? Of course. The invention of the printing press also indirectly led to the publishing of a lot of bad and uninspired books. But I'll always take more bad art if it also means the potential for more good art.
I don’t care about slop. But I do care about artists. Any more orders of magnitude (and there will be many more), and the value of art and human talent drops to zero.
AI may cure cancer, and for this I am genuinely excited. But with generative art I think this is going to be just horrifying for humanity. We might get a windfall for aspiring artists for a couple years, but at some point soon all the most popular art will be made by AI, and art as a human vocation will be gone forever.
AI is enabling way more people to be artists. If you have an idea for a short film it was never practical to shoot it before but now with AI you can. You’re still doing all the creative director work.
Art also isn’t really an interchangeable commodity where more means price goes to zero. People will pay for what they like most whether it’s made by AI or human.
I guess my position is that I care about art but don't really care about artists (moreso than I care about other people in other professions).
Like, being an artist shouldn't get you special dispensation or job protection vs being a janitor or an accountant or something.
Nobody is entitled to a job or career. But I believe humanity is being robbed of something bigger than money here.
If more people are able to enjoy more art, what do you think we are missing?
Or perhaps we'll have a class of truly inspired human artists who are the ones who best figure out how to use AI to create incredible new art.
So maybe we'll have fewer artists but they'll create much better art using new tools.
For like 24 hours before the AI steals from them and does a better job at that too.
I'm assuming that "truly creative human+AI" will always be better than simple AI.
I may be wrong, but I'm going with it.
If you’re talking about orders of magnitude, why would you think things go literally to zero?
The value of the human contribution will go to zero.
Great article Chris, thanks for contributing.
One of my wilder constitutional takes is that Copyright Clause should read that the "limited times" of an "exclusive right" for works should apply only to their "authors and inventors". Barring that, there is always statutory change to implement my take that posthumous copyright protection is bad. The international treaty cited on here is utterly ridiculous too, and it's shame that that's such a big hurdle. It's bad to create a bunch of rent seekers that did nothing to create the work itself that can just sit on the artificial turning of a public good into a club good for any time.
This kind of international treaty is just a clear example of European legal preferences being imposed on the rest of world while they were dominant and a good reason to reform international treaties and orgs to give Global South countries influence proportionate to their economic size today rather than 100+ years ago when these were written.
In this case, I would synthesize the Lost Future/Donald Trump perspective (which I generally oppose and abhor) that "International Law is fake" and "America can and should freely break treaties that it has signed since we're too strong to care about anyone/anything else" to say (paraphrasing Darth Vader) "we're renegotiating the Berne Convention to 14 years from creation [with compulsory licensing], pray we don't alter it further" and let the wisdom of the Founders flourish.
ETA: The LF comment I was referencing from last Friday https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-strange-new-respect-for-marjorie/comment/179864508
Thanks for the shoutout! As I just noted above, there is literally nothing preventing the US from withdrawing from the Berne Convention. And the increasing trend of European countries trying to bind everyone else into treaty law on a bunch of random things (labor rights etc.) is generally a bad direction for sovereign countries to go down
That was a good thread, I hadn’t seen it
I think it should be pointed out that the US was the 800-lbs gorilla of demanding increased international copyright protections for many decades.
Why should “Global South” countries be given more influence? They’re almost all basket cases. That statement sounds like a land acknowledgement. America First!
I don't think you read the statement fairly, as much as my kneejerk was to agree with you.
" Global South countries influence proportionate to their economic size today rather than 100+ years ago when these were written."
Consider:
That is, the treaties were written when countries B, C, and D were heavyweights and A, E, F, and G were not. Vowels were small back then, but some of them are bigger and we should take the updated status into account.
Nowadays, the real heavyweights are A, B, C, E, and F, so we should rewrite a bit to take the interest of the vowels (and F) into more account than before
At the very least, they have a better bargaining position now.
I mean, that would probably reduce the influence of Britain and France while increasing the influence of China and India, and that seems bad to me, though sadly more realistic.
Mm, I'm not sure I agree here. An artist should be allowed to sell their copyright to someone else - maybe the copyright is going to guarantee an income stream for 20 years but the artist needs the money right now for something.
Or posthumous - what if I write something amazing but get struck by a bus tomorrow? If I had lived, I could have made a bunch of money to support my family, but if I can't pass the posthumous copyright onto them, then they can't benefit.
To be clear - I'm saying that I should be able to pass on the _remaining_ years of my term onto heirs, not that terms should be Posthumous+50 - the terms should not depend _either way_ on how long I live - neither punishing my family for dying tomorrow nor sitting on my work for 100 years for having written it when I was 20.
Isn't the international treaty mainly pushed by the United States, and forced on other countries? So if the US wants to shorten copyright terms, it doesn't seem like there should be much objection.
This is basically favoring established authors/songwriters over poor ones.
Beyonce can probably self-fund the production costs on her next album and keep ownerships on the copyright, maybe offering a percentage to a label in exchange for help with distribution. An unknown who needs $50k to pay for studio time and session musicians (are those still a thing?) may need to give up the copyrights in exchange for that advance. So now Beyonce gets to profit from her work for longer.
In terms of posthumous claims, I get the intuition around not really caring if the author's great-grandchildren can continue to profit off their works. But should Buddy Holly's widow have been left destitute right after The Day The Music Died? You could have a fixed-rate term, shorter than today, but not have it care whether the original artist is still alive or not.
"Disney, for example, was forced to license various parts of the “Star Wars” universe to other creators, wouldn’t we just end up with an avalanche of horrible “Star War”-related content?"
The House of Mouse already did that without compulsive licensing, bro.
I’m just gonna say it: the thesis of this piece is dumb. You’re going to make cultural output “more dynamic” by making rehashes *easier*? The last two paragraphs give the game away here.
I feel like the author had a disconnected series of thoughts about copyright they wanted to write about here and was looking for some through-line to package them. In this, they have not succeeded—compulsory licenses and a revised regulatory regime for orphan works might be good ideas on their own merits, but as an impetus to orginal IP creation? This ain’t it, chief.
I don’t think the author is only arguing that “rehashes” should be easier - I think they’re also arguing that genuinely new work with mild similarities to what came before (which describes virtually all art) should be easier. See, eg, their comments on litigious rights holders like the Ceelo Green estate. It’s worth remembering here that being sued is costly even if you win.
The litigiousness part of this piece is basically the part of it that is most coherent in support of the claimed thesis, but I think it would need *vastly* more robust information in favor of its causative impact to chalk anything up to it. As an IP lawyer I am extremely skeptical. [ETA: People just don’t live in fear of copyright infringement suits in a way that has a distortative effect on creative works short of wholesale copying, as a practical matter]. Plus you only take a compulsory license *if you know you infringe ex ante* (it can’t be a limitation on ex post damages or you would de facto legalize all but the widest-scale commercial infringement because enforcement wouldn’t make economic sense. A mechanical license for a music cover is in the range of 9 cents (Ed.: looks like 13 cents today, actually)), but that’s a calculus you already have to get right based on the current status quo.
As an IP lawyer, do you have any thoughts on the difference between the timeline for a copyright and a patent?
Speaking solely in my pesonal capacity, copyrights seem too long to me (I think 30-50 years fixed term would probably have minimal if any pernicious effects) but there’s no obvious reason to index them to patents — the regimes just aren’t trying to do the same things (in particular “progress” doesn’t clearly mean anything in the arts rather than the sciences.) Patents should probably be guided by the dynamics of the pharma industry which is where I think they are most unambiguously doing what they’re supposed to be doing — I’m not personally in the pharma space so am not going to have the most informed PoV but it’s conceivable that 15 rather than 20 years might be a better regime without precluding economic recovery for drug development, but low confidence in that claim. That said there’s a huge amount of international treaty inertia also implicated by any changes, so easier said than done.
I appreciate your perspective! But I’m a bit skeptical that patents and copyrights are doing different things. I think both are (or perhaps should be) monopolies granted to incentivize production. This doesn’t mean that they can’t have different optimal timelines! But we should be able to point to a difference in, eg, costs of production to justify different timelines.
The trouble is that "costs of production" is sort of meaningless for copyrights (one the one hand, you have however many hundreds of millions of dollars Disney spends on something, on the other hand you have Stephen King in front of a typewriter with variable costs limited to food, ink, and (during certain periods) cocaine). There's probably a much smaller spread for patents, but plenty of costs are ancillary to the patent itself (e.g. you can patent a compound without ex ante awareness of its therapeutic effectiveness) .
I think you put it well in a comment earlier regarding the different valence of moral rights to copyrights vs. patents - "These different rationales for copyright will prescribe different timelines for protection." Copyrights are personal creative works (which we sort of intuitively want to protect independently of maximizing production) where there's at most some sort of forgone hedonic benefit from not having them, but for the most part they aren't in and of themselves taking a chunk out of the publicly exploitable domain (even if you tried your hand at writing something with the exact same plotline as A Tale of Two Cities, without copying it would read nothing like Dickens). Patents, because they aren't indexed to copying -- and because "monotonic progress" is meaningful for them in a way not true of most copyrights (indeed, I think it's debatable if novels even count as part of the "useful Arts" in a constitutional sense -- arts, sure, but "useful?") -- just warrant a fundamentally different cost benefit calculus (and, by extension, a different legal regime).
I think songwriters getting sued for supposedly copying melodies is very unfortunate, but I also don't think any of the people who've been sued were genuinely innovating. The idea that truly creative, paradigm-shifting musicians are thinking "Uh oh, I can't be *too* innovative in case I end up in court" seems to me completely unrealistic and backwards.
I don’t think I agree with this model of how artistic innovation works. I can’t really think of any work of art - including one’s usually considered “innovative” or “paradigm-shifting” - that doesn’t draw inspiration from art that came before it.
Yep. There’s this whole idea in copyright law that stock elements aren’t protectable because that would kill art. What is generic enough to be a stock element? Who knows—go spend millions of dollars litigating about it.
Agreed, but my claim is that the small number of lawsuits over alleged melody-copying aimed at global pop megastars have not in fact led to smaller, more interesting artists thinking "I am now prohibited from drawing inspiration or having influences, so I have no choice but to make a fully licensed rehash."
The idea isn't that it doesn't draw inspiration, it's that drawing inspiration is not in general, and has not been in the past, a source of material risk of facing copyright litigation in the absence of relatively egregious copyright infringement -- rather, its explicitly allowed. Have meritless suits over this kind of thing happened ever? Sure. Is it an acute risk? Not really, no.
One argument I have seen is that De La Soul's 3 feet high and rising contains a ton of unauthorized samples and is clearly great and innovative... if you can borrow work freely perhaps you end up with better stuff than if you have to pay a billion dollars to licnse one song (which you basically end up re-doing, like with Anaconda or Super Freaky Girl)... that said its also the case that De La Soul was a super interesting and talented group coming out with music at an interesting time so it's pretty unlikely you're going to make great music just by changing the laws... idk.
To be honest I really just have a hard time drumming up sympathy for the putative harms to sampling-based songs caused by copyright law. While proponents would argue that it’s an art form being inhibited by copyright, between the entire art form being dominated by one genre of music that I don’t especially care for (everyone else having done fine without it), the availability of licensing, and—most importantly—the fact that the entire art form is premised on deciding that a core part of copyright law (viz., no wholesale copying for commercial exploitation) just doesn’t apply to the people who want to sample, makes me look at its complaints with kind of a jaundiced eye. This isn’t some kind of copyright edge case, this is basically thumbing your nose at the centuries-long legal regime and being shocked, shocked to find that it poses legal difficulties.
I think everything from your comment from “most importantly” on just begs the question, the question being whether copyright law is doing good or harm here.
I understand your point, but I don't think it's vacuous to raise the point "how convenient that you have created a unique art form that requires special pleading relative to the pre-existing regulatory regime and for which you claim licensing is inadequate." Put another way, I think that the 'central point of copyright' (i.e. wholesale copying is not allowed) is clearly load-bearing in a way that sampling undercuts (ETA: or in other words, the cost-benefit analysis comes pre-weighted toward one side) — what’s the principle behind a carve out? Just an expanded notion of fair use?
Compulsory licenses didn't seem completely like a bad idea to me, I haven't thought through implementation though. Like if the international agreement is easier to modify where after 45 years compulsory license occur...how different is that than no more copyright after 45 years?
I will support whatever politician makes that Nicki Minaj video illegal.
Basically, I just want to see a ban on terrible country interpolations of actual songs (e.g. "Isn't She Country" by Locash [formerly Locash Cowboys], "Lonely Road" by Jelly Roll and Machine Gun Kelly, etc.).
Pat Finnerty enjoyer I see
The king. Also: no Seger no sale.
¿Donde está Bob Seger?
Now do bardcore.
The FCC loves censorship these days. I don't know if you can keep those songs off Spotify, but you could probably keep them off the radio.
The country version of Blinding Lights is pretty decent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k7CnpZ9KFg
Covers and interpolations are two different things. An interpolation is basically taking a song, changing a few words and pretending you wrote a new song. Usually somebody writing a cover acknowledges it's a cover (it would take some balls to do otherwise I suppose).
Ohhhhh
Yeah, covers are often pretty good (see e.g. Toad The Wet Sprocket's cover of "Hey Bulldog"), and the idea is usually to do justice to the original song.
Interpolations *can* be good, especially if the idea is to basically quote a snippet of a song in another song (interpolating just means playing part of one song in another, not necessarily remaking the whole thing). A good friend of mine who's a guitar player used to like to interpolate "While My Guitar Gently Weeps " in "The Best of What's Around" by Dave Matthews Band, because their B sections share similar (same? I don't remember) chord structures.
"Isn't She Country" is technically an interpolation, but it's just basically "Isn't She Lovely" knocked down several intervals (so it's easier to sing) and with absurd lyrics that really shit all over the fact that "Isn't She Lovely" is about Stevie Wonder's newborn daughter.
Led Zeppelin had some serious balls then.
Which song?
Most of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Led_Zeppelin_songs_written_or_inspired_by_others
I've never heard interpolation being used this way (seems fine, probably would have gone with derivative?)
Interpolation doesn't HAVE to be terrible, but it's often just lazy songwriting.
I was being annoying mostly about my hangup for how I understand words (interpolation seems like the band composed a new song then used an old song to create a second new song between them or used two old songs to create a new one). Where like derivative is like used the old song extensively to create a new one or a sample uses a piece directly but only for a small portion.
Could compulsory licensing be a way around the Berne Convention for more than just music? Yes a work is still technically "under copyright", but if the government declares it must be licensed and sets a government-mandated rate, that's a very different situation.
Mind, I say "get around" but it doesn't even necessarily have to violate the spirit of the Convention if there's an honest attempt to set rates in a way that values the property correctly.
The US could just withdraw from the Berne Convention too, there's nothing preventing that. (I like to say this because I'm a skeptic about the increased trend of binding countries' domestic policies via treaty)
Yea, was wondering that too. Could you have like a two tiered copyright where first 45 years or whatever it prioritizes the artist's control of the work then the back end is allowing them/family compensation (if regulations and behavior don't make that extremely difficult).
Great guest post!
Also, speaking of Billy Joel, he has some questions to answer regarding his own originality. We have Billy Charles ("New York State of Mind"), Billy Jagger ("You May Be Right"), Billy McCartney ("Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"), Billy Costello ("It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"), Billy Valli ("For the Longest Time"), Billy Sting ("Running on Ice"), Billy Bowie ("Pressure"), etc. (Note: I can't take credit for these - https://youtu.be/u1TyactU53Q?si=qS1Dvnv6Vr-5gaYr)
Funnily enough my favorite Billy is from his latest (1993!) album - "No Man's Land" slaps - and seems to be Billy playing Billy Joel.
Interesting take but cannot like—Elvis Costello > SRRtM
This is the point - SRRtM is derivative of Costello, is what I'm saying.
I truly am here for this take. My husband is baffled by my Billy Joel dislike. It started when I was at an impressionable age, when Billy Joel was quite popular, and I first heard Elvis Costello. At that point, I thought, why would I ever listen to Billy Joel again now that I can listen to Elvis?
I will say this about Billy - he's a monster performer. He can sing his own songs live with the same or better energy than on the recording - *in tune* - which is way more than can be said of a lot of contemporary performers.
And his catalog is huge, too - he was putting out almost an album a year between the 70s and 1993. So there are going to be some, um "inspired by" songs in there.
If you're not a Billy Joel fan, then you must simply watch the above video.
I never listened to much Joel growing up, so that might explain why I actually enjoy his music as an adult? Sure, he wasn't terribly original, nor are his lyrics particularly deep. But man can he write a tune, and his progression as an artist through the 70s/80s had a nice sweep to it. Sure you could just listen to someone like Elton John instead. But why not both?
There's something that just seemed fundamentally "uncool" about Billy Joel, at least as we got, I dunno, into the early aughts? He had obviously been an enormously successful pop star with something approaching a two decade long run of reliable hitmaking. Not sure why he became "uncool" — perhaps by the late 90s his music just came across as overly earnest, or sentimental? And there was a quality drop off, I guess, as he moved deep into the 1980s. But pretty much everybody suffers from that.
But I'd say maybe enough time has passed for something of a Billy Joel reputational reassessment to have occurred. And if you just look at his catalogue (or rather, listen to it) out of context, there's really some excellent stuff there. Some of his songwriting approaches the level of polish and sophistication of, say, John-Taupin or Steely Dan. I appreciate him a lot more than I did 20 years ago.
I don't *hate* Billy Joel's music, but it's definitely not something I'm going to prioritize. The only exception of a song of his that I will listen to regularly, because I enjoy history, is how damn catchy We Didn't Start The Fire is.
The Fallout Boy version is decent too
The fact that it's not in chronological order is so irritating though
1000 times this. *Ugh* Billy Joel!
OK yes derivative but so inferior in each instance! Apologies for misunderstanding but was triggered by the comparison...
Oh, believe me, I get it. For instance, the existence of the deeply terrible country interpolations I mention above offends me in a pretty profound way.
“Interlopations” is new to me but I like it!
Sorry, spelled it wrong - it's interpolation, not interlopation.
But in any case, interpolating means quoting part of a song in another song. It can range from just snippets - jazz musicians do this a lot - to "quoting" an entire song and changing aspects of it so that it's now technically a new song, as with these terrible country interpolations.
Interpolation is the actual term, think there was a typo, and it's been around a long time.
It's basically taking musical elements from another song (to the extent you have to credit them) but not doing a straight-up cover.
The most famous early example was probably "I'll Be Missing You" interpolating "Every Breath You Take" in the 90s
On the topic of movies & TV shows, what's really caused a rise in sequels and IP re-licensing (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) is just the rise of enhanced competition with the Internet. In the 90s the movie industry faced very little competition for people's time and attention, so wealthy film lovers could finance artistic vanity projects. With far, far more screen entertainment vying for attention today, it makes movie financing much more conservative. Why finance a new artsy movie when you could make another Star Wars or whatever?
That, plus the death of Blockbuster greatly reduced the longterm income stream studios can get from a given movie. Netflix et al pay quite a bit less over the life of a movie than renting it out repeatedly at Blockbuster ever did. This again incentivizes conservativeness- only fund what you know will be a hit (Marvel, Star Wars). I'd also throw in increased foreign competition- American movie studios in the 90s were in a super-dominant position globally that they aren't today
The article gets the economics backward. Monopoly pricing reduces consumption because consume more of the cheap or free option than the expensive one.
Biopics can certainly generate demand for back-catalog works, but that effect actually cuts against the author’s thesis: investors have to spend heavily to manufacture demand precisely because the underlying works are locked up and costly to use. If copyright terms were 20 years, everything before 11/24/2005 would be public domain. Gladiator would stream for pennies. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone could be freely remixed, reshot, redistributed. Studios and streamers would race to use that cheap IP, and consumption of old culture would explode. If terms were life plus fifty years there would be modest demand growth for public domain works but wouldn’t change much.