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0 pointschipdale14h ago0 comments

> There's zero benefit to society

Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?

In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.

How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?

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autoexec9h ago

> Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?

I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.

I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"

Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)

The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.

IG_Semmelweiss8h ago

i understand your logic , but there's a problem with that assertion.

the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value . That thinking is flawed. If anything, the copyright owner contributed to the equity accrued to the copyright. They should be able to pay the high price to keep adding value to it. This does not discriminate. IN fact, i would say the opposite, what you are proposing, feels like stealing.

If i dump millions into developing a copyrighted work, why could any random artist with nothing to lose be able to exploit the work by paying a small/no fee? This seems incredibly unfair. Do you agree?

autoexecnew28m ago

> the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value .

The owner deserves to make as much money from their product as they can within the law, but they should only be able to exclusively profit from that work in any form for 10 years. That's entirely fair.

Copyright isn't the natural order of things. It's an extraordinary restriction on our freedoms. If I hear a song, there's no kind of natural law making it wrong for me to sing it while out in public the next day. There's nothing morally wrong that either. It's a massive imposition for the government to tell a free person that they can't share certain stories with others.

For almost all of human history copyright did not exist. The stories that were told, and which became foundational to all stories being told today, were not protected by copyright. People who heard those stories just retold the ones they liked again and again making whatever changes they felt like making and the most popular versions of those stories spread and gained a foothold on the culture. That is the natural order.

The reason copyright law was created was not so that people can profit for as long as possible by restricting everyone else's ability to retell stories or sing the songs they've heard. It was created to promote the creation of new creative works. That aim can be easily accomplished in a single decade.

Locking up vast amounts of our culture behind copyright for ~100 years or more is what sounds like theft to me. Not only are copyright terms of that length excessive, but they are so prohibitively excessive that they actually hinder the creation of new creative works as well as the ability for people to profit from newly created works.

For example, consider the problems encountered trying to make and sell Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_The_Blues). The artist behind that project made extraordinary efforts to put her work out into the universe. It's easy to see how many others in her situation would have been forced to give up or could become disheartened enough to abandon the project after realizing that there could be no monetary profit in it.

When a work enters the public domain that doesn't even mean that the original author or previous owner of a copyright can't continue to make profit on that work. It just means that other people can build off of that work and/or can publish/sell/distribute that work to others. That's perfectly fair too. I've personally paid for works that were in the public domain on multiple occasions.

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