Disappearing Works and Cancel Culture

March 11, 2021 9:27 AM

Why disappearing works matter in the conversation about cancel culture (with a digression into the wolf-kink erotica DMCA takedown issue) An interesting take on cancel culture by Daniel Takash... "There’s never a bad time to discuss the interlocking problem of long copyright terms and disappearing works. While certainly a good idea, fixing the former won’t do anything about the latter and ignores reforms to copyright law that could more effectively address these issues. To be blunt, I’m not optimistic that much can be done to address the issues created by our current copyright terms, let alone reduce them to thirty years. Our current terms of life plus seventy (95 years for other works) is too long, and the retroactive extension of copyright terms by the Sonny Bono (or “Mickey Mouse” if you prefer) Copyright Term Extension Act remains an unforgivable power grab by legacy rights holders. However, even modest changes like former Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante’s suggestion to return to the pre-1998 terms of life plus fifty would face legal constraints, to say nothing of the herculean political effort it would take to make such changes a reality."
posted by burningyrboats (52 comments total)

Some overlapping thoughts from Matt Yglesias: "Oh, the intellectual property rights you'll extend: Dr. Seuss as a policy issue."
posted by PhineasGage at 10:45 AM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Not requiring registration of copyright was the biggest mistakes we ever made in regards to IP. Copyright should require free initial registration, displaying the registration number on the work, reasonable fees for maintaining that registration, and a steady escalation of said reasonable fees as the work gets older in order to compensate the public for not releasing the work to the public domain. Keep it as long as you want and can make money off it but once you've squeezed it dry, give it back or pay for the privilege.

Mickey Mouse and Superman should be protected by trademark and those are registered, maintained, and can eventually be abandoned. There's no reason for Steamboat Willie to be under copyright right now other than Disney wants to stop anyone from milking any possible nostalgia $ from the demand edge cases that they don't want to spend the money they would need to in order to try and meet that demand.

If you want to make your money from your creation, fine. For better or worse (worse) we live in a capitalist world and artists need to eat. But your creations are supposed to be on loan from us.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:47 AM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

Unless the process to register a copyright was very, very quick and easy, or one registration could cover all works created during a certain period of time, that system would be unworkable for a large number of artists. It's easy to say "just register it" when you're talking about large works like novels and movies, but I think artists who produce many smaller works over a long period of time deserve copyright protection too. What about a webcomic artist who posts a new comic every day? Or a music producer who is constantly making new beats? Automatic copyright greatly benefits small artists, and that benefit should not be discounted.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:00 PM on March 11, 2021 [12 favorites]

Strong, vehement, disagreement with Your Childhood Pet Rock.

(Disclaimer: I have a dog in this race.)

Yes, Life plus 70 (or even 50) is way too long, but life plus a term sufficient to see out widow(er)s and orphans to maturity seems desirable. More to the point, it avoids the worst problems of a copyright registry, which are that it'd be international in scope, every piece of IP would need to be registered (my own ballpark guess is I've created 500-1000 over the past 30 years, and I'm not very prolific in terms of creative quantity), and who's going to run it? Most likely a vast IP tracking corporate monopoly who will treat copyright registration as their own personal money mine.

Not to mention, current copyright laws are required for compliance with the Berne Convention of 1886 (updated in 1971), an international treaty to which pretty much every nation is signatory and which is mandatory for WTO membership and WIPO compliance -- if you violate it you trigger a horrible international trade sanctions dispute at minimum, and getting 179 governments to agree to change it is a monstrous challenge. In that kind of negotiation corporate lobbying invariably plays a huge role (it takes multinational funding to bankroll lobbyists to follow the diplomats from meeting to meeting around the world: local pressure groups have proven largely ineffective) and once started, if a renegotiation goes anywhere, it probably won't be in the direction we (members of the public and individual creators alike) would prefer.

TLDR: copyright horrible mess, and a copyright registry won't make things better.

(If I had a magic wand, I'd walk individual copyright back to life plus 30 years, and separate corporate copyright out entirely -- Disney can afford to pay a registry and file for updates every decade. Then I'd add an orphan works provision: create a register of orphan works, allow publishers to make good-faith efforts to contact the heirs of a dead creator, and then to register an interest and pay royalties into an escrow account while they republish. Making such royalties available following due process by any heirs who come along and can prove title would in return grant immunity from copyright infringement. But there's about zero chance of any of this ever happening ...)
posted by cstross at 12:04 PM on March 11, 2021 [41 favorites]

Re: 'small' creators, every photograph each of us takes on our cellphones is automatically copyrighted. There are only a few reasons/situations that call for explicitly registering those copyrights:

Why Should You Register a Copyright?
You don’t have to register your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office to receive copyright protection, but registration has several important advantages:
• Registration creates a record of your copyright ownership.
• You must register your copyright before you can file a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
• If you register your copyright within three months of publication of your photo or before a copyright infringement occurs, you can recover additional monetary damages and attorneys fees in a copyright infringement lawsuit. These damages, called statutory damages, allow you to recover money without having to prove the amount of your financial loss or the amount of profit an infringer earned.

posted by PhineasGage at 12:09 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

I'd also like to note that a flat 30 year copyright term would kill the long-form multi-book series work stone dead. I'm still writing Laundry Files, 22 years after I started, and it's not finished. Other authors in a similar position include Jim Butcher, George R. R. Martin, C. J. Cherryh, Steven Brust, Glen Cook ...

And no, the 30 year term wouldn't result in their (our) works being available for free in the public domain: it'd simply result in the publishers not paying royalties to the authors any more. Because an aspect that isn't remarked on much is that cover design, book blurbs, and typesetting and layout are all separately copyrightable aspects of a book. The publishers can tweak the layout and facelift the cover and claim renewed ownership over those elements, and keep selling it commercially ... but stop paying the author for the contents. If you want to issue a free copy of the book, you're going to have to copy-type it from scratch. Where's the public benefit of that?
posted by cstross at 12:09 PM on March 11, 2021 [27 favorites]

PS:What we're arguing about here is artificial scarcity created by the externally imposed conditions of capitalism, which sets up a "let's you and them fight" adversarial struggle over money between creators (who want to eat) and consumers (who want content).

What we really need is the proverbial fully automated luxury gay space communism, so that us creative types can follow our muse without having to worry about monetizing it (because scarcity has been abolished), and those of us who don't have muses can still enjoy the fruits of creativity.
posted by cstross at 12:14 PM on March 11, 2021 [15 favorites]

I, like Mr. Stross, would also be happy to live in a world where copyright doesn't need to exist because artists don't have to feed themselves with their art. But that is not the world we live in, and that's why copyright matters. If you don't like it, you're welcome to release your work under another license like Creative Commons, but don't punish artists for needing to live off their art.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:21 PM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

But your creations are supposed to be on loan from us.

This is quite literally saying to creative workers "your labor is meaningless." It is the argument that because creative workers all build on the works of others (because that is how culture works) that they don't deserve to have that labor respected - hell, the argument literally says that work isn't really theirs. And then people wonder why the creative industries have been slowly hollowing out.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:22 PM on March 11, 2021 [11 favorites]

Where can I buy a muse at a reasonable price?
posted by PhineasGage at 12:26 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yes, Life plus 70 (or even 50) is way too long, but life plus a term sufficient to see out widow(er)s and orphans to maturity seems desirable.

How does that make any sense? The guy who fixes the brakes on your car doesn't get to keep charging decades later to feed the "widows and orphans." He does what everyone does. Pays his Social Security taxes and saves for his own retirement and the widows and orphans on the side. Why should writers be different?

You want more money, you do what the guy who fixes your brakes does. He gets up every morning and goes back to work. He doesn't expect to get paid for work he did decades ago. His "widows and orphans" don't get paid for work he did before he died.
posted by JackFlash at 12:45 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

The idea that something tangible (a fixed set of brakes) is the same as something intangible (a book) is a fatuous strawman argument. Moreover, the guy who fixes your brakes doesn't spend a career fixing only one or two sets of brakes a year and nothing else. A stronger comparison might be to a guy who built and owns the shop where your brakes got fixed. It is reasonable for his brake-fixing business to produce income for his widow and children after he passes away.
posted by slkinsey at 12:58 PM on March 11, 2021 [12 favorites]

...it's not going to do so, though, without doing new work?
posted by tavella at 1:04 PM on March 11, 2021

And likewise an author's work doesn't continue to produce income unless new copies are sold.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:06 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

The idea that something tangible (a fixed set of brakes) is the same as something intangible (a book) is a fatuous strawman argument.

Tangible vs intangible isn't probative. A tax preparer or physician performs intangible services.

Moreover, the guy who fixes your brakes doesn't spend a career fixing only one or two sets of brakes a year and nothing else.

That time distinction isn't probative either. What about the guy who builds one or two houses a year?
posted by JackFlash at 1:07 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Anyway, I personally think the two 28 year terms was a pretty good set up. If your work was valuable enough to you, you could renew it, if it wasn't, it went into public domain and was much less likely to be lost. I think life is also a pretty defendable term, and I suppose that for political reasons life+20 is an option or there will be much screaming about the babies, but anything after that is insane in my opinion.
posted by tavella at 1:08 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

Mind you, I think social programs and life insurance should be what is supporting any orphans and widows/widowers, just like when any other person leaves a family behind, but as I said, it would be a strictly political consideration.
posted by tavella at 1:11 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Or maybe the artist, the mechanic, and the shop owner should all save money during their working lifetimes, and that savings (and a good social safety net and maybe a life insurance policy) should suffice for their posthumous dependents.

Copyright in the US originally had a 14 year term in the US, at a time when the reproduction and distribution of works was extremely expensive and time-consuming. A large chunk of the copyright term might be exhausted just getting a printing contract and finding an audience.

Now most new works can be distributed worldwide nearly instantly and for almost zero marginal cost. If anything that's an argument for an even shorter term. 30 seems generous.

I'd also like to note that a flat 30 year copyright term would kill the long-form multi-book series work stone dead. I'm still writing Laundry Files, 22 years after I started, and it's not finished. Other authors in a similar position include Jim Butcher, George R. R. Martin ...

I take it that the argument is that no one would write multi-decade series because after the first book entered the public domain the market would be flooded with follow-ons? That seems like it's only a risk if the knock-off writers are producing substantially better material in that setting than the original author, which...okay? The original author had 30 years to make money off the first book plus any sequels produced during that time. After that a little competition seems like a good thing.

Also, I'm not entirely sure how that argument holds water against the existence of massive amounts of fanfic for such series. Lots of people are still eager for the next Game of Thrones book despite 41,803 pieces of GoT fanfic on AO3. Or for the next Dresden Files despite 2,021 fanfics for that series.
posted by jedicus at 1:14 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Actually, I'm kinda warming up to this idea. What an interesting world we'd live in where instead of paying for the movie rights hollywood simply hires an assassin. And with one quick trip to Ohio we could all finally get the official Hobbes plush dolls we've always wanted. JK Rowling surely has no more useful creative output in her, it'd probably be better for everyone if Harry Potter abruptly entered the public domain.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:17 PM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]

I could get into 28 year terms renewable until death, actually. Stuff you don't care about falls into the public domain relatively quickly, stuff you care about you can keep all your life, and any dependents can get a little bonus, the runout of whatever 28 year terms are still active.
posted by tavella at 1:26 PM on March 11, 2021

Dear Author's Partner and Family,

We at Big Publishing House give our deepest condolences to your partner's untimely death. We had hoped to continue our contract with your partner for many years to come. However since they've died all their work has automatically entered the public domain. We write this letter to inform you we will continue publishing all their books just as we had before, as well as publish the two drafts they had sent to our editors, and also finish out their unfinished series with a work-for-hire ghostwriter. You will not see a single cent of the profits from these continued sales, because a bunch of people on the internet decided it was better this way. We don't know why either but it benefits us so we're not complaining.

Sincerely,
Big Publishing House
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:32 PM on March 11, 2021 [15 favorites]

Tying duration of copyright to duration of life has always struck me as bizarre. Ideas and works are not children which we must guarantee as a society outlast their parent. If you come up with something at twenty, I’d say it’s reasonable to let go of control at seventy.
posted by meinvt at 1:40 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

"If you come up with something at twenty, I’d say it’s reasonable to let go of control at seventy."

Just like if you bought a house at 20, you should lose it at 70!

Why is it that, of all workers, Internet know-it-alls have it in for authors so much?

A little reminder that, of all workers, authors are the ones who are not paid for their work. Take two years to write your masterwork, and no one is paying you for rent, food, health insurance, etc. In the US, at least, two years of unemployment while not looking for "real work" means you're not getting unemployment compensation, either.

If you're lucky, you get some money when the book is published. If you're conventionally published, most of the money goes to the publisher. If you self-publish, most of the money goes to the production process. Here's an Author's Guild survey which found that the median income for full-time writers in 2017 was $20,300. All published authors, $6080.

If you have a clever analogy based on jobs, perhaps yours, where you are paid for your work as you do it, then just sit on it, please.

"But UBI..." no, please sit on that too, until it exists.
posted by zompist at 2:06 PM on March 11, 2021 [14 favorites]

jedicus: I take it that the argument is that no one would write multi-decade series because after the first book entered the public domain the market would be flooded with follow-ons?

No.

A thing about series works is that usually each subsequent unit sells fewer copies than its predecessors: if you're just treading water from book to book, you're bucking the prevailing market trend and doing well. Sales seldom rise.

What does happen, though, is that whenever a new book comes out, the back list titles get a small sales bump—the first book especially, then a diminishing bump for each subsequent book as new readers come onboard for the series. This makes it just about possible to tread water on a slowly diminishing series by regularly putting out new episodes.

So if the first book stops paying royalties, that's an instant (and drastic) royalty hit for the author on all newer releases. Basically you're doing all the work of producing new material but someone else is mopping up an increasing proportion of the revenue from the series.

(Even worse: it's highly likely that bottom-feeding publishers will start to monetize the out of copyright works by retypesetting them and selling them at a price point that undercuts even the original publisher—who stopped paying your royalties on the first books—thereby reducing their incentive to buy and/or publish new books in the series because it's less profitable. So even the hypothetical exploitative asshat publisher gets undercut, with knock-on effects on the original author.)
posted by cstross at 2:07 PM on March 11, 2021 [17 favorites]

28-year terms renewable by the author(s) as long as they're alive, maybe? Series writers could look after their series, posthumous children could get royalties well into adulthood*, abandoned works could be made public before their original fans died.

*although such a child might be born 26 years into a renewal. Tricky to balance this automatically against abandoned works.
posted by clew at 2:12 PM on March 11, 2021

zompist: If you're conventionally published, most of the money goes to the publisher.

Quibble: nope.

You may be on a 10% royalty (actually, no: you're on a royalty somewhere between 6%—you got a shit contract for mass market paperback rights only—and 40%—you got a sweet contract for high-end ebook rights) but that's 10% of the price the customer pays. Of the rest, Amazon (or the wholesaler and retail outlet) pocket 50-70%. The publisher spends 10-15% on production overheads (paying editors, buying ink and paper, marketing/advertising), and they then take 5-10% in profit.

The publisher and author split the profits more or less 50/50; after production costs are met, the bulk is gobbled up by middle men.

(Note also that the production costs of an ebook are nearly as great as for a paper edition: mass market paperbacks in the US cost roughly 30-50 cents to manufacture, and hardcovers cost on the order of $1.50-$4.00 depending on quality and size. Manufacturing is ridiculously cheap, but editing/typesetting/marketing costs are very inelastic indeed.)
posted by cstross at 2:17 PM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

Let me give you a couple of scenarios I use to judge proposals to change copyright laws. These are edge conditions, tests for "what can possibly go wrong under this proposed change?"

1. Life plus x years posthumous copyright

— Author dies unexpectedly, leaving a pregnant partner who gives birth 8 months later. They were expecting to support their child to adulthood. How well does x work?

2. Fixed copyright term of y years

— Author wrote their masterpiece when they're 78 years old, dies at 80.

— Author wrote their masterpiece when they're 28, dies at 80. Add 52 years of writers' block, so it's their only source of income.

3. Fixed copyright time of y years, renewable once for z years (or z times for y years each time)

— same tests as in (2).
posted by cstross at 2:26 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

Author dies unexpectedly, leaving a pregnant partner who gives birth 8 months later. They were expecting to support their child to adulthood.

Happens to people every day. When they die, their income stops. What makes authors special?
posted by JackFlash at 2:30 PM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]

Author wrote their masterpiece when they're 28, dies at 80. Add 52 years of writers' block, so it's their only source of income.

Seriously, what did they do for 52 years? Nothing? Maybe if they are unable to write, they should get some other job that pays a living.

Maybe someone's dream is to be an airline pilot or a fireman, but if they can't do those jobs, they probably will find something else they can do.
posted by JackFlash at 2:35 PM on March 11, 2021 [5 favorites]

JackFlash: Seriously, what did they do for 52 years?

That would be J. D. Salinger right there in that corner.
posted by cstross at 2:38 PM on March 11, 2021 [2 favorites]

That would be J. D. Salinger right there in that corner.

And so ...?
posted by JackFlash at 2:40 PM on March 11, 2021

It seemed to me like the longer of life +25 (ish) or 50 (ish) would make sense, I have no idea about how long corporations should have copyright. This covers people who died very shortly or very long after their major success. (I am ignoring the impossibility of enacting this law.)
posted by jeather at 3:58 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

This feels like one of those things where there's too many interlocking parts for any one "Just do X" proposal to *not* have messy knock-on effects. (and everybody's got their interest)

Myself? I'd love to see sampling/mashups be more viable again. Fanfic of the musical world, if you will. People love pointing to the Beastie Boys as having done something which couldn't be done again, because of changes in sampling clearance. And that's a shame.

But I'm pretty sure if I were to come up with some sort of proposal for that, someone else would be able to come along and come up with a counterfactual where Trent Reznor's kid dies in poverty because Lil Nas X was able to use a sample of a sample of one of his tracks for Old Town Road without preclearance.

I want to see people able to interact with their culturally significant markers while they're still alive. But, given ample example of resellers & publishers & middlemen finding elaborate schemes of bastardry, I'm not sure how exactly to get there from here.

Ah well, on the upside, the grey-market space means there's tons of free music/stories to enjoy for free. Bootie Mashup is booming, especially with them needing to finally start streaming with the pandemic.
posted by CrystalDave at 3:59 PM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

Copyright in the US originally had a 14 year term in the US, at a time when the reproduction and distribution of works was extremely expensive and time-consuming.

So, it's worth remembering that quite a few of the people who conceived that term length (most notably Jefferson, whom I've seen quoted by anti-copyright activists) literally made their living on the backs of others. It was easy for them to be sanguine about creative labor when their own standards of living were built on chattel slavery - something to keep in mind when you reach for the Founding Fathers as support.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:25 PM on March 11, 2021 [6 favorites]

Happens to people every day. When they die, their income stops. What makes authors special?

I'm genuinely starting to think you're arguing in bad faith, because you seem to be willfully misunderstanding how authors earn money. Writing a book is more like an investment, where you put in a lot of effort at the beginning and collect royalties from it for a long time. If you're lucky you get a decent amount of money up front as an advance, but that's just money taken from your future royalties. That slow trickle of money from sales is the ONLY way authors get paid for their work.

There's only two possible places where royalties can go after the author dies: the author's estate, or a corporation. You are arguing that the money should go to a corporation. I know it seems like copyright only exists to keep folks from making an honest living drawing Mickey Mouse porn, but there's more to it than that. It protects authors and artists from the ravages of a capitalist system that is far more capable of turning their art into profit than they are.

Tangible vs intangible isn't probative. A tax preparer or physician performs intangible services.

Also you're wrong here, tax preparers, physicians, and break mechanics are all performing the same kind of labor. They're trading on their knowledge, experience, and labor to perform a one-time service to a customer. You think a set of prepared tax documents isn't tangible? Or a diagnosis and prescription? Comparing any of these jobs to what an author does is a gross misunderstanding of what authors or artists do.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:26 PM on March 11, 2021 [17 favorites]

I thought from the article title that this would be about fanfic writers taking their fanfic down...

I wonder how many works are really in the same position as the Dr. Suess book, where the copyright holders, who aren't the original authors, decide they don't want the original books in circulation anymore and can actually recall all the copies because they are digital copies on loan and not physical copies in circulation. It does risk creating a kind of 1984, we've always been at war with Oceania situation where copyright holders can do historical revisionism at will, and new readers won't have the context to understand the present (because they won't have the context to understand the past).

Speaking of Disney and the Disney vault and moral revisionism (and A-B-O kinkfic), though... I just watched this video by Lindsay Ellis today, seems relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU1ffHa47YY

It's an argument about the moral costs of taking your old works, and "updating" them so they'll be superficially progressive, without really thinking about the deeper themes of the works at all.
posted by subdee at 5:29 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Bah. Poor starving "Widders & Orfinns" freezing in a Parisian garret after their poor insane genius dad penned the last lines of his famous magnum opus and then conked out is a moronic metaphor. Intellectual property is always Owned and Controlled by the lawyers for media publishers and corporate conglomerates, and they like to keep spinning this inane myth to keep their stranglehold on some basic themes in culture intact.

Long Copyright terms are stupid, we end up with Zombie Mickey Mouse and random weirdos like Stephan James Joyce.

Also, I hate Widders & Orfinns.
posted by ovvl at 5:35 PM on March 11, 2021

Nobody in this thread read the actual article in the OP, hunh? It's pretty explicitly about how impossible and potentially undesirable reducing copyright terms are and what we can do to work around that and improve the copyright regime anyways. But for an article that explicitly sidesteps discussion of changing length-of-copyright as unfeasible and unproductive, it certainly has generated a thread full of people dickering about length-of-copyright that feels....unfeasible and unproductive.

I want to see people able to interact with their culturally significant markers while they're still alive.

100% agreed. But you don't need to change the length of the copyright to make that happen; you just need to change the terms of what kinds of interactions people are allowed to make with copyrighted works.

I think this is one of those areas of life where we all agree that the current situation is bad so we try out different solutions, imagine what they would look like, the imagined results are also bad in some respect so we throw them out and repeat the process ad infinitum. I think you get better results keeping your eyes on the prize, looking at "what do we want the future to look like?" and working backwards from there. Dickering over copyright terms is not the way to go. Aside from highlighting the benefits of Luxury Gay Space Communism, I think focusing on the future we want suggests that what we really want is simply a future where regular people don't get fucked over by large soulless corporations. At least, what I want is copyright enforcement to require much more clear-cut evidence that you have standing to demand enforcement, and much more clear-cut evidence that you have sustained actual injury from the infringement. (There are an awful lot of companies, and even authors, who are CONVINCED that piracy cost them a fortune when in reality piracy cost them next to nothing, or may have even made them money!) You can cut down on a lot of copyright trolling and bullshit takedown notices and a lot of the other shit we all hate about copyrights without changing the length of the copyright term at all.

You can also limit the impact of bullshit takedown notices etc. by changing how digital ownership works (so that when you buy an ebook, you actually own that copy of that ebook, instead of buying a limited license to look at an ebook that is actually still owned and controlled by Amazon or whoever, which is what largely happens now), as the article in the OP suggests at length.
posted by mstokes650 at 5:41 PM on March 11, 2021 [7 favorites]

(note: I don't hate real persons whose spouses have passed away nor children without parents. I do hate fake constructs based on these images).
posted by ovvl at 5:47 PM on March 11, 2021

Aside from highlighting the benefits of Luxury Gay Space Communism, I think focusing on the future we want suggests that what we really want is simply a future where regular people don't get fucked over by large soulless corporations.

And yet people are readily happy to do said fucking when it's framed in their own interests by those very corporations. It shouldn't be forgotten that a good number of anti-copyright groups receive funding from Google, which would benefit significantly if they didn't have to deal fairly with the people creating the content they distribute. Look at this thread - even after we have an author of some note point out exactly how copyright protects his interests to allow him to make a living at his profession, we still have people trot out the "inane myth" that copyright is just a tool of corporations, not realizing that line was fed to them by one of those corporations to advance their own agenda.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:14 PM on March 11, 2021 [8 favorites]

MeFi's own jscalzi also has something to say on this.

Myself - I side with the authors - unless someone is paying them by the hour, "on spec", then they deserve their copyrights. To argue that this is the same type of work as fixing someone's brakes is a bad faith argument.

By this logic - someone who writes a software program should also not benefit from their copyrights after a certain period of time either.

Or - we should go the other way and everyone is just an incorporated entity... (hmmm... I think another author came-up with that as well...)

So - if authors should just get a job like everyone else, why shouldn't everyone else just become an author and reap the benefits of such a "profitable" scam?
posted by rozcakj at 6:31 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

There's only two possible places where royalties can go after the author dies: the author's estate, or a corporation. You are arguing that the money should go to a corporation.

The royalties wouldn't go anywhere because there would be no royalties after death, in this scenario. The work goes into the public domain.

Nobody is saying that authors shouldn't make a living. But since copyright is a legal construct, it's fair to have a discussion about how long a copyright should last. I'm guessing many authors would say forever and some readers might say never, but there is a long range between never and forever up for discussion. But the trend over the years has been to continually increase the length of copyrights with no real justification.
posted by JackFlash at 6:54 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

No one has a problem with someone making a living, they're questioning why some people get to continue making a living after they're dead (to the detriment of the culture at large).

Okay, here's my last attempt at explaining this. Imagine an investment vehicle that you put a significant amount of time and labor into at the outset, and in return you get a dividend out of it. It's sort of like an annuity, but more volatile because sometimes you get a lot of money in return and sometimes all you have is the satisfaction of bringing something to completion.

Let's call this novel form of investment a "novel." It is, in the economic sense, a good. The work you did is valuable, and because you hold the rights associated with it you can authorize a third party to replicate your hard work, sell it, and send you a percentage of the proceeds called royalties. So you see the works an author writes are a peculiar sort of investment. Instead of using money to purchase a good such as a stock or bond the author just makes something valuable out of their own head. But authors are known to be peculiar so we will grant them a little indulgence.

Now, when you die, the wealth you gathered in life does not vanish. It is generally parceled out to your descendants as dictated by law or a document called a Will. This includes one's physical possessions as well as any goods and investments they have left over. People generally find this process pretty uncontroversial.

Except for you.

What is it that makes the rights to an artistic work so damned important that you want it to be immediately taken away when a person dies? What is the detriment to the culture at large if these goods, like the rest of a person's earthly property, do not immediately vanish into the public domain? Likewise, if we're going to take away the copyright to their life's work why not take the rest too? There's plenty of public good that can be done with cold hard cash: Roads, schools, welfare programs. These are all much more clear-cut than the amorphous good that a work entering the public domain does. If we're going to take away copyright why not just take it all every time anyone dies? House, possessions, investments, savings, take it all. Everything. They're dead, they don't need it, and their freeloading relatives shouldn't need it either.

This is why copyright should be longer than just the life of the author. Please note I'm not defending copyright as it is now, TFA explains quite well the problems with copyright as it stands. I'm just trying to very patiently explain why a copyright term of life of the author doesn't make sense and would not be an improvement.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:58 PM on March 11, 2021 [3 favorites]

If we're going to take away copyright why not just take it all every time anyone dies? House, possessions, investments, savings, take it all. Everything. They're dead, they don't need it, and their freeloading relatives shouldn't need it either.

I mean, you say that, but is that really so absurd? (yes, self-evidently if you held everything else the same, but we've already established that this is a 180-player game of Jenga played across a century)

But if we're proposing anything be able to change for the better, I'd enthusiastically support cutting software protections. More aggressively than 30 year, even. There's no reason Konami should be able to keep "minigame during loading screen" locked up for 20 years (patent), or EA keeping "dialogue system on a radial wheel with morality mapping to directions", or Warner Bros. keeping "Dynamic NPC relationships in hierarchical view".

Copyright is an invented construct, there's *really* no reason to treat the current system as inviolate/natural law.

Make sure everyone's cared for and protected, then aggressively ratchet down intergenerational wealth transfer. It's one of the biggest contributors to inequality in the world.
posted by CrystalDave at 7:14 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

The royalties wouldn't go anywhere because there would be no royalties after death, in this scenario. The work goes into the public domain.

Early on in the thread... comment by cstross

"And no, the 30 year term wouldn't result in their (our) works being available for free in the public domain: it'd simply result in the publishers not paying royalties to the authors any more. Because an aspect that isn't remarked on much is that cover design, book blurbs, and typesetting and layout are all separately copyrightable aspects of a book. The publishers can tweak the layout and facelift the cover and claim renewed ownership over those elements, and keep selling it commercially ... but stop paying the author for the contents"

Sorry - but I have seen this time and again in big-box bookstores, you go browsing and see tons of books that are 100% legitimately in the public domain (classics), for sale... Someone is making money, they don't print these out of the goodness of their hearts... Even eBook "presses" get in on the act. Slap a new cover on a book they probably just scraped off Gutenberg, and are now selling for a few bucks...
posted by rozcakj at 7:54 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

For those who believe that copyright should extend beyond the life of an author, it seems shortsighted to make analogies to other possessions (e.g., real estate, physical objects, money) that are left to heirs without acknowledging what we now know about the immense and compounding inequalities caused by (low-taxed) wealth passed along to heirs. I'm sure that many instances of inherited copyrights have low or no value and thus pose no challenges to growing inequality but the issue should not be ignored.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:14 PM on March 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sorry - but I have seen this time and again in big-box bookstores, you go browsing and see tons of books that are 100% legitimately in the public domain (classics), for sale... Someone is making money, they don't print these out of the goodness of their hearts... Even eBook "presses" get in on the act. Slap a new cover on a book they probably just scraped off Gutenberg, and are now selling for a few bucks...

That's the point of the public domain. Anyone can do anything they want with it. If you want to sell it? Fine. If Project Gutenberg wants to post epubs on the web for free, fantastic! If someone wants to shove zombies into a novel that doesn't benefit from their presence, that's their prerogative.
posted by No One Ever Does at 10:07 PM on March 11, 2021 [4 favorites]

But your creations are supposed to be on loan from us.

I think a better way to put it is that it's human nature to copy and use and re-use each other's art. We make some laws about who can copy what as a means to recognize, reward, and support artists, but those restrictions are arbitrary and unnatural, so there are limits to how successfully and how long you can tell all of humanity not to copy some work of art.
posted by straight at 12:10 AM on March 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

I do prefer the solution of loosening the restrictions that creators have on their works after 30 years - 30 years is an entire generation, and as we're discovering now, that's usually enough time to find out the old works haven't aged gracefully. But I also think there's a difference between the moral right to be the creator of the work, and the right to demand payment for how a work is used, that public domain doesn't recognise.

I do not know how you legally define the right to treat a work as part of the culture, that belongs to us collectively while still being effectively owned by its creators or copyright holders. I don't know how you'd legally define a difference between, say, being able to have the Ghostbusters turn up in a TV show without having to pay a license fee (a situation that, in music sampling, has led to creators getting royalties for songs in which none of their work appears because it samples a song that sampled a song that sampled the original work) and making a knockoff Ghostbusters sequel. I don't see how you simultaneously, in law, respect the moral right of active authors, or their estate, to be the major beneficiaries of their creative work, while letting other creators benefit from the ways their work has shaped culture, without leaving giant holes that dickheads can drive monster trucks through.

(I suspect that part of the problem is that we need to solve this in the American legal tradition, a tradition generally pretty terrible at handling grey areas but great at coming up with forced acronyms for laws.)
posted by Merus at 12:27 AM on March 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

Google books (which has changed my life) says it presents all its out of copyright material freely, but has not always been keeping up with time lines. Thus an out of copyright book may be blocked, or seen only in snippets (eg. Frederick Ryan’s charming Malta, 1910), BUT - can be purchased from some Print On Demand service, this even with books that Google itself has scanned and may (or may not) be found on archive.org or Hathitrust. Alas, those two can be similarly capricious in what out of copyright stuff is and is not available. No doubt they have their reasons, but damned if I can figure them out. (This is particularly frustrating in the case of aging multivolume reference works which might as well be missing volumes for their availability on line.)

As to copyright- life of author plus a few decades. It’s not as if heirs and assigns are suddenly closed to the idea of redistributing work of dead relatives, or are unwilling to share continuing profit with publishers and printers. Esp. in an age of print on demand, the risk in republishing is negligible.

One food for thought anecdote - When Dashiell Hammett died (1961), his lover Lillian Hellman talked his daughters into giving her the copyright of the master’s work for $5,000. She then proceeded to market the hell out of them (television, movies, reprints). Raises interesting questions of cui bono. Public and Hollywood and LH benefited; the family, not so much. And now? Hammett grandchildren now manage the legacy.

For those interested in the subject, I recommend Center for the Study of Public Domain, a project of Duke Law.
posted by BWA at 10:23 AM on March 12, 2021

What do you think is proved by that Hammett/Hellman example? Ownership of copyrights can be sold, just as they can be licensed. That changes nothing about how - and for how long - copyrights should be in effect and exercisable.
posted by PhineasGage at 11:16 AM on March 12, 2021

A lot of bad analogies in this thread, so I'll include another bad analogy for the sake of completeness.

A comparison to a mechanic's brake job only makes sense if the standard method of paying for brake repair was not a one-time fee of $500 (or whatever), but rather a fee of 2 cents every time the brakes are used for the next few decades. I'll bet that mechanic would lobby for a longer time period to maintain the rights to that brake repair job in that circumstance.

Also, Mickey Mouse is the "gay wedding cake" of the copyright debate. It's used to focus the conversation on a particular extreme example rather than how something works for most people.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 12:04 PM on March 12, 2021 [3 favorites]