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Comments (214)

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  modeless
  The major problem with copyright is it's too long. The vast majority of revenue from copyrighted content is made in the first couple of years, and yet we extend copyright 70 years past the author's death! If copyright lasted two years instead, all the problems with it would be much less severe.Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose. We need to treat that monopoly power with more respect. We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly. Copyright is allowed in the Constitution for "limited times" and Congress has ignored that.
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  vintagedave
  I've published and sold my own software. I'm a writer (unpublished as yet, but I hope to use CC4 like Cory Doctorow - ethical copyright.) I've seen my software pirated; I've benefited financially from selling it. I know authors and their struggles with income.And I agree. Copyright in its current form does more harm than good.Copyright was introduced to counter genuine harms: there are stories of people publishing in the UK, and having what today we'd consider pirate copies of their books selling massive quantities in the US, for example, with the author seeing no revenue. I believe anyone who puts work into creating something, physical or non-physical, should be able to derive revenue from their work. But I also believe in the public good; that 'information want to be free' in that thoughts, ideas and stories are meant to be shared; and that in a fast-moving world long-term prevention of movement is harmful. I also believe that over time, protections meant for individuals become weapons for the powerful, and I believe we're there now.Further, I worry that over the past decades to today, 'rights' are being socially redefined as property rights. We consider privacy, an inalienable human right, as something for us to be paid for by Meta. This is implicitly and silently treating an inalienable essence of being human as something to be bartered away, and I think a social retreat from the concept of property rights as being anything other than localised to, well, property, would help. Reduction or abolition of copyright would be a radical positive change in a general social attitude here.Realistically, radically adjusted copyright (3 years for software, 10 years for a book or music?) gives both an opportunity for profit and allows reasonable expiration while still relevant. In the absence of that, yes, complete abolishment would be an upheaval but a net benefit to the world.
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  tristanj
  Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda, trying to convince you that copyright is bad so they can avoid copyright lawsuits and use everyone's data without paying licensing fees. Without copyright, they can use your data for free.
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  DrScientist
  In a world where copyright doesn't exist - let's say I spend two years writing a novel/or a book on the history of computers.What's to stop other people making and selling digital copies the moment it's published?How am I ever going to justify that two year investment?
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  Daedren
  >It's abused to take down content that's not in violation of copyrightThat's a problem with DMCA in that it's applicable in an immediate and unilateral manner and any decision to resist comes after the takedown. DMCA is the problem in this context, not "copyright" itself.
• hliyan
  (1) As I understand, the first modern copyright law was in 1700's Britain, which broke a printer monopoly and shifted control of works from publisher to author. It also meant that an author and their family would not starve while their work was still generating revenue for the publisher (who would have outright purchased and owned the work).(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.
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  monneyboi
  While initially a perpetual right to copying for some publishers, copyright was made into what it is today to "promote creation". Funnily enough it's used in the exactly opposite way. Culture is basically frozen, same movie and same music released every week.The fields where creativity flows the most seem to me the ones furthest away from copyright. FOSS and memes come to mind.What matters is who made something, regardless of who copied it. I think that in a ocean of AI generated content, this will become more and more important. Platforms like patreon and kofi show that people care about creators and are willing to support without 'buying a copy'
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  purpleidea
  Don't fall for this trap! GrapheneOS leadership is very against Copyleft, probably to cater to it's corporate sponsors, and copyright is really the only thing that protects Free Software at all. Proprietary software can be kept secret, and only shared as a binary, but the only thing that protects Free Software (open source) is copyright law.It's not perfect, and the terms are far too long, but we do want to keep it. Reduce it to 20 years and we'd be golden.
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  laserbeam
  Hear me out. What if copyright could only be claimed by the creator/artist OR public domain. Make it non-transferable. Force big media corps license music from artists instead of owning it outright. Push negotiating power to the artist away from the organization. Avoid "Taylor Swift re-recorded all her music to own it" and similar stuff in the future.
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  solatic
  You'll throw Hollywood and most of the publishing industry out of business overnight if you "abolish" copyright. Not a good idea to throw so many people out of work.Copyright needs to be reformed, absolutely. Not abolished.
• jackpepsi
  From the perspective of "The general purpose computing device I own should be able to run any instructions written by anyone without legal issues" then copyright sucks. Massively abused by corporations to unproductively charge rent by squatting on obvious implementations.From the perspective of "I'm an artist and I want to make a living off the things I create" copyright has some utility. (Although also gets in the way at times, as in bad faith music plagiarism cases)I feel both perspectives. On a moral level not sure how to unite them in a way that doesn't enable some kind of abuse.I'm sure we can improve the current systems though.
• kepeko
  After a short/zero copyright it would be a "free for all". But that sounds lovely! It would be a different business model, not ripping someone off. I don't recognize copyright as some kind of "natural law". Taking someone's physical property, that's theft. Singing a song that you have heard, that shouldn't be theft.
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  matude
  Funny how copyright used to be held to such extreme value before that many governments agreed to implement the "empty cassette laws" which then got conveniently also applied to empty cd-s, even though there's no guarantee that every single empty cd would be used to burn copyrighted material. And now that the copyright has become an annoyance to AI training, suddenly there's voices and support to abolish the whole thing.I agree that it is broken and probably needs to be reformed, but abolished outright would lead to a ton of issues right?
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  Aloha
  Copyright shouldn't be abolished, it should be reformed however.It should be 20 years, with right to renew, your first 10 year renewal is free, then the cost skyrockets, with proof required that you are still using the work in commerce, and after that first term, you get a flat rate 5 year extension, then it must be renewed annually with escalating fees.It allows the big IP places to hold on to their family jewels, but also would return a significant amount of orphaned work to public domain.
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  po1nt
  Many comments here are throwing arbitrary numbers. These are driven just by some internal feelings instead of a data driven policy. The best solution would be to abolish it completely. It's a practice that wouldn't exist without the violent backing of the state. It's a monopolistic practice abused by wealthy. (I do realize the implications for R&D heavy businesses)
• nmstoker
  It has issues but I would rather see reform of patents first. Given the greater pace of developments now, effectively they now represent a proportionately longer period now than in the past. And they are too broad, along with various abuses (especially around novelty)
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  AngryData
  Copyright needs to be shorter, but also it should be non-transferable and unable to held by anybody except the individual it originates from. Corporations shouldn't have rights to start with, only restrictions, and they certainly shouldn't have rights over thoughts or ideas.
• KaiserPro
  Did google circa 2012 write this?All of this is a problem because someone exerted influence over the US government.Google _knew_ that openai was scraping youtube to train whisper et al. They didn't stop it because they realised that they if they sued them, they would have to pay to train.So they silently also did the same thing.With that, copyright in training went to shit.Copyright, should, allow you or me to make a living from "intellectual works" or anything else tangible/not tangible
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  teiferer
  Funny how people writing such things are also at the forefront of accusing LLM companies of stealing big time. Because of copyright violations.So, which one is it?
• anon
  undefined
• mrkeen
  What's the most generous, charitable definition of an alternative?
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  bruce511
  "Copyright" covers a lot of areas, from films to books to software etc. So blanket statements about it are not helpful.From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.
• Cider9986
  Every week GrapheneOS seems to come out with a good take. Monero, Authoritarianism, AI, now copyright.Very well aligned with my beliefs not to mention it's one of if not the most private OS.
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  Mikhail_Edoshin
  Copyright should be commoditized. A possible first step could be giving copyright owners a single obligation: you have to sell what you own. That thing you have must be available on the market.This rules out negotiations. They imply a possible negative result, hence the thing is not really available. A public offer, however, is fine.This thing alone may change the situation quite a bit. Imagine a true market for textbooks or streaming media where every provider has the same selection of titles and has to actually compete.
• blfr
  As a Linux user of over 20 years, I really don't like thinking of myself as some Aborigine barely holding on to a scrap of ancestral land. My tech preferences have become so ubiquitous that nearly the entire Internet runs them.In Angels in America Roy Cohn is given this line where he is so politically embedded he can simply guess stuff and be right "You don't know what all I know. I don't know what all I know. Half this shit I make up and I'm still right". I feel this way about tech now.I don't need to worry how it works. I take a guess of how it should work and I'm usually right. Not on Windows or some other subpar platform. But can my Android play white noise on the speaker and a podcast on the headphones? While yes, of course it can. I learned that fiddling with Pulse audio years ago and now it's just expected.
• someguynamedq
  It already de facto has been. Have you seen LLMs?
• bronlund
  Copyright is just formalized greed.
• AlienRobot
  I don't think I have ever seen someone outside of tech saying this. It's always people working with the data-copying machines, never the people creating the data protected by the law, that want said laws gone.
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  badlibrarian
  The problem with “more harm than good” arguments is that the amount of harm relative to the amount of good is rarely specified. Is it 60/40 harm/good? Then shush, it ain't gettin' fixed in your lifetime. Is it 80/20 harm/good, but the harmers have the power and the people being harmed don't? Same. Type all you want on "grapheneos.social" but you're not moving the needle.Abolishing copyright also means abolishing copyright-based licensing. GPL, Creative Commons, all that loses what makes it work. Want to give corporations a lot more power, really fast? Nuke GPL.Abolish copyright and you replace it with patents, trade secrets, and whatever new nonsense some of the worst people on earth will come up with. Before we abolish copyright, we should wait until Larry Ellison dies just to be safe.
• _davide_
  I agree, copyright is a just yet another monopolistic tool and it isn't making the market any favor. Copyright could be gradually be reduced to a few years, the market will adapt, for example collecting money before producing the content (like a movie or an album), collecting more money from concert rather than music directly (which is going to happen anyway since it's competing against generated content), etc... Having a weak copyright or having it replaced with a far lighter framework is not science fiction and i honestly believe it would improve the quality of life for the vast majority.> Don't fall for this. This is big tech propaganda,If LLM overlords were to stomp on copyright just to train their model, i would be happy, even if it's their doing.
• conorcleary
  "The ceiling blocks my view of the sky, and the roof doesn't let me see my TV from outside; we don't need framework or anything to keep the weather out, it's sunny!"
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  Yizahi
  Copyright is good and should be enforced. I say this as a person who doesn't hold any copyrighted materials. Anyone pro abolishing it is deluded by the "free market" myth, which is not possible in any form.
• flaburgan
  Interesting to read this while the US gov doesn't give a fuck at all and use Pikachu and Tetris to make racist hateful games...
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  maybewhenthesun
  Copyright is good. It's the justice system letting money buy it's way out of enforcement that is bad.If you create something you should have some protection of other people just blatantly ripping you off.Copyright terms are in dire need of a reset to a sane length, though. Disney (among others) has spent way to much money extending the term each time their cartoons threatened to expire.Patents on the other hand should never have been used for software. Patents have their function in preventing inventors from keeping their designs secret, but the whole system is set up to give people to invest in building large brick halls filled with steam engines and it does not match software's pace of development at all.
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  intended
  Not disagreeing with the post- wouldn’t this come under the category of “everything is bad for users when the corporations become too big”?
• cat-whisperer
  yes
• jongjong
  We can't abolish it. That would be theft. A lot of people worked very hard based on the assumption that their work would be theirs and that they could monetize it.It would be the greatest theft of human labor since slavery.If we switch to a communist system with UBI, then that might be acceptable. Otherwise not. You can't arbitrarily abolish laws as soon as they become inconvenient to capital.
• OtomotO
  Copyright isn't, patents in their current form are though.
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  bryanrasmussen
  Firstly, for the Americans, yours is not the only country and so while it is true that you made laws regarding copyright for a particular purpose it is not the same reason that copyright exists in much of the rest of the world, in most of the EU it exists because it is supposed that the creator has rights to what they made and that's it, whether it benefits society or not.It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!
• metalman
  And fuck graphene, which is making a major move to pretend to social responsiblity, but is a honey pot waste of time where the corporate head is distinctly missing.
• draw_down
  [dead]
• jll29
  It could be shortened to 20 years like patents, or copyright could end with the creator's life.Also, there could be an excemption for LLM training purposes.
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  VBprogrammer
  This is a completely pointless debate, because even if it's true the people who currently be benefit from copyright have far more money, power and influence than any rational argument against it.