Intent should matter.
On the other hand if you’re selling action figures you expect little kids to create their own stories with those characters. Culture has long mixed existing characters in new ways just look at any mythology before writing. Jokes, memes, fanfics, etc are the natural progression of a culture and giving up on that seems detrimental in ways that aren’t obvious.
I think rather it's borne of a world that views ideas as something to own, rather than something that you give to the world to enrich culture, arts, or sciences. There are people who desire perpetual copyright, and the eradication of the public domain. They see ideas as something they have a right to monetize until the end of time.
Someone may want to abolish copyright on books and still desire control over a sex tape they made 50 years ago.
Memory is associative not some perfectly indexed logical deduction. Play a clip of something next to something else and people link them even if it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s not such a big issue of someone is using characters from a novel in a new context, but we’re also dealing with recordings and deepfakes. Make a minor edit to a song and play it in a commercial and many people would get confused as to what the original lyrics where.
Legal systems constantly deal with intangible abstracts like intent. “Pepe the Frog being co-opted” is cashing in on the existing work rather than operating in some hypothetical framework.
Beyond that, creative works shape society, and arbitrarily restricting them stifles creativity. Granting exceptions for reasons like ‘think of the children’ or ‘it’s just for the lulz’ fails to address the greater issue.
Being ‘Official’ is irrelevant. Noting happens without individuals doing something, who would then be liable in the system I am describing.
> Granting exceptions for
Exceptions completely defeat the point here. It’s the implied support that’s the problem not what’s being supported. Someone could be a well known champion of the issuing being supported, but disagree with being associated with the people presenting the message.
We limit what you can do with someone’s likeness and someone’s works deserve protection for similar reasons. Under the current system this issue is irrelevant because of how long copyright lasts, but if you want dramatically shorter copyright people are going to want this kind of protection even for works they aren’t receiving royalties from.
So they could have gotten some value again as relics?
"All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law (17 USC section 407).
This law requires that two copies of the best edition of every copyrightable work published in the United States be sent to the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress"
I don't know how/if it works in practice, but if the copyright is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", I think that it is perfectly fine for the LOC to guarantee that when the copyright expires at least a copy is still around.
This doesn't mean that it should provide universal access though, especially while the copyright is still valid.
(maybe the devil is in the referenced details, but alas I have not time to investigate now)
But my point was more about the matter of principle: it is reasonable for the government to ask a copy of the works (for preservation reasons) in exchange for time-limited rights over it.
Believe it or not, the official role of the Library of Congress is mostly to be a library serving Congress.
Their website says "The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office."
They do keep copies of things registered for copyrights, for copyright purposes.
I don't believe there is any legislation or funding to give them the role of finding and preserving 80 year old 78s en masse.
So “supposed according to whom” is according to law and all of history.
The Lib of Congress (probably not in the copyright office part of it) does have some historical audio recordings in their collection, including digitizations, but I don't think on this scale.
Yes, the Library of Congress actively collects old audio (and even has 450,000 of those old 78s you claimed they don’t gather, and around another million unpublished ones). They have funding and mandates to do so.
This entire thread is you posting opinion as fact, but these opinions are demonstrably false. Before posting things as true please do some due diligence.
It was truly one of the best ways to discover music because behind each recommendation was a human that were both enthralled you were interested and would tailor their recommendations to suit your tastes.
Spotify use to have humans curate their playlists and during this time is was almost as good, but since they've moved to ML models recommendations have gone to truly awful now.
Does anyone have a link to such an index for what.cd? Just the following:
* album/track string plus minimal metadata (release date or whatever)
* hash for the track that goes along with that given piece of unique metadata
Such a thing is obviously on the right side of the law-- you can't reconstruct the copyrighted content from the hash or the title. And the name of an artist/track title isn't copyrightable.
That would be a valuable index that shows the exact state of what.cd's database before it was taken down. And I don't think it would be that large.
Maybe it's their legal prerogative, but I'm of the mindset that if they are doing no good, at least do no harm.
As an example, I recently started listening to eurobeat. I looked at Wikipedia and found that there is a CD series called "Super Eurobeat", which already published 250 volumes, containing about dozen songs each. Think about this again -- there are about 3000 songs, all of them already selected as "best of", just from one genre I previously didn't know about. Given that I don't spend much time listening to music, it might take me more than a year to listen to all of them; and after that point, I would be happy to start from the beginning again. So, from my perspective, it is not necessary to make new music, ever. And if we lived in the kind of world where copyright expires let's say after 14 years, most of that would even be legally free. And the same is probably true for most other genres.
Ok, this is extreme. New things are cool. But the more you are aware of the good old things that exist, the more work it takes to impress you. You will still be impressed with great new things, but much less with average new things, especially if they are expensive. And I suspect that the average new things make the largest part of the sales.
In a court of law? Not seriously nor credibly. The term of a copyright is provided for by statute.
... you still require a winning strategy and winning execution, or you've only done harm.
> maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not.
Well, I made my distinction, which you clearly read and were aware of but made this post anyway.
This must be why life keeps getting better and better for Americans each year!
It would kickstart innovation, settle fair use of training data, and protect the internet archive.
On the downside: companies (not artists) would make a bit less rent-style income.
So even the downside is a win, in my book.
This results in highly profitable media still being in copyright, but basically everything falls out somewhere close to the year 25 1m renewal mark, or soon after.
Also, you have to give a few master copies to the copyright authority, so that it's less likely for the media to become lost.
I think a lot of people would consider it unfair
But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.
Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.
Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.
The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.
On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.
You hold on to.copyright of.a song you sang when you were 8 and isnt making any money? So what ?
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/05/13/why-did-the-unite...
20 years for trademark is negotiable. That there needs to be an expiration date is not.
The problem I have is with trademarks being used as nouns but somehow not becoming generic. I searched "Velcro" on Amazon.co.uk. The best selling item is Velcro branded "Stick On". What even is a "stick on"? No reasonable consumer would identify that as a hook and loop fastener without context. "Hook and loop" isn't even written on the front of the packaging. The "Velcro" trademark is clearly functioning as a noun, which means from an ethical point of view it should be generic.
Well, small and mid-size businesses are easy to miss if you work from home or live in a big city. They don't wield anything like the kind of power you describe. But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs. You may want to stop and consider the value of multi-generational family-owned businesses.
wrong again, small businesses do not account for even 45% of US gdp. sorry to hear your jet ski rental isn't doing well
You'd have to be seriously arrogant to believe that your labour should support multiple generations of your family.
I don't have any copyrights or trademarks or anything, but if I did I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo who only wants to use my work to pad their own wallets.
Those aren't the only two options. If your copyright expired after a few years, your work would simply go into public domain, freely accessible to anyone. (The ones to "reap its benefits" at that point would be the general public.)
> Why?
The amount of money a single person spends throughout their lifetime generally orientates itself on the amount of money a single person earns throughout their lifetime. (We earn significantly more than 50 years ago, but we also spend a lot more, because our standards rose accordingly.)
If you expect your money to support the lives of multiple people (generations even), you are implying that your labour is worth multiple times as much as the labour of others. That is arrogant.
(I don't claim it should be actively prevented to make such large amounts of money. But we shouldn't legally limit people's access to literature just so a few authors can create a dynasty.)
Five years is a bit too short. Maybe five years automatic and then require renewals up to 25 years. It’d be good to have different terms for different types of things: software should be shorter, films or books should be longer terms.
Trademarks have to be renewed already. Why make them eternal?
It's not as though the record labels themselves have ever shown an inclination to take on this monumental task as a way of thanking the hundreds of artists and the millions of fans that enriched them.
So far, the Internet Archive has done more good in the short term than I have with Murfie, but I can't help but feel like their lax approach to copyright law will do more harm for us all in the long run.
A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever.
This might be true for mass media, strong maybe, but it’s absolutely not true in general. You could use a laser cutter to cut holes in a glass or gold plate or something, if you extrapolate that to the far future you could imagine it would be something the average person could achieve in their home much like 3d printing is easily accessible now. Dvds after all are not that robust, they have long term issues.
But why would we do that?
My point is that the reasons for CDs and DVDs happening do not exist anymore and will never come back.
> But there’s an even more blunt, obvious way of asking this question that doesn’t require knowledge of byzantine U.S. copyright law. Why didn’t the Internet Archive just think twice before making a song like “The Frim Fram Sauce” or Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” — the most popular single of all time — available online for free? There wasn’t any concern about even a Frank Sinatra hit on 78?
> For a few moments, it’s just the hearty horns of Bob Haggart and His Orchestra. “It wasn’t a problem,” Kahle says after a beat. “We talked to people, it wasn’t a problem.”
Seriously? Like, why not do this in a responsible way instead of a way that is going to create bad case law?
I just donated money to the Internet Archive.
For any particularly good reason, other than, "piracy is a cultural norm?" Kind of tautological.