Why public domain

[doubleshuffle]

There must be a typo in the article you linked to. The German Wikipedia says that in 1965 copyright in Germany was extended from 50 to 70 years.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschi...0._Jahrhundert

That extension must have been what Schmidt referred to in the interview, so what I got wrong were the copyright terms pre- and post-extension. What I clearly remember is Schmidt saying that 20 years was plenty.

[barryem]

When a carpenter builds a house he sells the house and no longer has any claim to it. When an artist paints a picture and sells it he loses any claim to it. Why isn't something comparable also fair for authors?

In the USA the original copyright period was 14 years, renewable once. Even that seems ridiculously long to me. If a writer writes a book it seems more than fair to give him 5 or 10 years to recoup the time he spent on it. The point of copyright is to give the author a chance to make money. Five years would give most authors 99.99% of what they'll ever get for most books. If a book is exceptional then he probably already made a bunch from it.

I'm only talking about books. Movies may or may not have different issues. I enjoy movies but I don't care enough about them to have thought about their issues.

Barry

[leebase]

If you build a house....50 years later nobody comes along and says “this house now belongs to the public”.

If you sell the house and put the money in the bank. It stays your money and your kids inherit it.

If you open a restaurant...and you work in the business all your life...it doesn’t become “the public’s restaurant” when you die. You can sell the restaurant...or your kids can keep the restaurant going.

If you are a farmer....the fields don’t go to the public just because you retire from farming. You have all the crops you previously harvested...and the land is there to grow future crops that your kids farm...or they sell the farm.

If a book/story still has economic value...why shouldn’t the copyright holder continue to benefit? The public did nothing to create the work so why should they confiscate the economic value from the heirs or the owner?

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by leebase

If you build a house....50 years later nobody comes along and says “this house now belongs to the public”.

If you sell the house and put the money in the bank. It stays your money and your kids inherit it.

If you open a restaurant...and you work in the business all your life...it doesn’t become “the public’s restaurant” when you die. You can sell the restaurant...or your kids can keep the restaurant going.

If you are a farmer....the fields don’t go to the public just because you retire from farming. You have all the crops you previously harvested...and the land is there to grow future crops that your kids farm...or they sell the farm.

If a book/story still has economic value...why shouldn’t the copyright holder continue to benefit? The public did nothing to create the work so why should they confiscate the economic value from the heirs or the owner?

[doubleshuffle]

Isn't there a difference between physical and intellectual property? Isn't that why patent and copyright laws are different than laws regulating the ownership of physical things?

I think it is utterly wrong to claim that the public did nothing to create a work of art. Quite to the contrary, the work of art exists in a continuum of ideas, could never exist without the art that came before it; it all is a giant web of influence, reaction, borrowing, appropriation. It is what keeps culture going. Imagine not being able to build upon the work of Shakespeare because of copyright? If there was a Shakespeare Inc. that worked like Disney, a play like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead could never have been written, because Stoppard would have had to licence the use of the characters. Would all those films based on Shakespeare's plays or Jane Austen's or Charles Dickens's novels been made if those works weren't in the public domain?

And how many ideas from the 20th century lie dead in libraries in books that the copyright holders don't reprint because it wouldn't be economically viable, but which still can't be uploaded to places like MR for free, because they are still in copyright?

And if you demand eternal copyright, you must also demand eternal patents. Now try to buy a car, if the manufacturer had to pay licence fees to the heirs of every inventor back to the laddie or lassie who invented the wheel? Do you think you could afford one then?

[doubleshuffle]

Oh, and your house: Licence fees for the heirs of the inventors of: bricks, glass, windows, rectangular windows, oh, the right angle used in every corner, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Yay!

[Ghitulescu]

There are several types of copyright - according to the type of activity covered.
The artist holds the copyright only on her/his work, but a publisher can prevent her/him to print it by her/himself.

I do not understand why the artist has to have 95 years of copyright after his/her death - the purpose of the copyright, as indicated in the discussion preceeding the Berne Convention in 1860, was to allow him a source of income. The 20 years after was for his relatives. Nowadays, a book brings almost instant financial success, unlike in 1860 where one author could die in misery before his book written 30 years before could sustain him financially.

The copyright is against the natural order of things - the humans succeeded being a social species, that means they shared, from food to battles. The key to success was sharing information. All animals living in colonies developed a language to share information. The ants leave a chemical trace to the food source, so others could speedily go there and bring it home before their competitors. Prey animals have a warning system announcing their kin of predators around.

Most times, the authors live a golden slavery - at a first glance they are independent and rich and creative, but if one digs a bit, he'll see that they are obliged to issue a book a year or every second year (the first major author I've heard that did this was Jules Verne whose editor Hetzel wanted from him 2 books a year). He can, of course, leave this golden cage, but then he'll lose the resources of publicity (and favourable "critics") a publisher has. This is one very negative aspect of copyrights, which actually forced people to create garbage only to fulfil the contracts. The music industry is probably the best example of this institutionalised garbageism.

On the other hand, in the true advancing technologies, we have patents, which end 20 years after filing. And the industry flourish (they also have some specific issues, like the well-known patent trolls), and they also have to pay a tax or else the patent is invalidated. In many countries one does not pay for copyright.

If the prevention of knowledge transmission will succeed, then the humanity may be in danger - yes, we did manage to destroy all natural enemies, like tigers, wolves, bears, sharks, whatever... but we will fall prey to our own kin. We are supposed to love him, but he should, too, in return.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by barryem

When an artist paints a picture and sells it he loses any claim to it.

I know this isn't relevant to your point, but I'd just like to mention out that this isn't true anymore.

Artists retain the copyright in their works, even if the original belongs to someone else. Just because I own a picture by (say) Andy Warhol, I can't make money by selling copies of it.

Recently, in the UK, there's now also Artist's Resale Right, which lasts as long as copyright. There are similar laws throughout the EU, since the UK law implements an EU directive. When a work gets resold, a small percentage of the sale price goes to the original artist.

[Quoth]

Yes, 25 years after death is more than generous. The extensions are nothing much to do with income for estates of authors; most of the benefit is to Corporations with companies like Disney being one of the bigger spending lobbyists.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by leebase

If you build a house....50 years later nobody comes along and says “this house now belongs to the public”.

If you sell the house and put the money in the bank. It stays your money and your kids inherit it.

If you open a restaurant...and you work in the business all your life...it doesn’t become “the public’s restaurant” when you die. You can sell the restaurant...or your kids can keep the restaurant going.

If you are a farmer....the fields don’t go to the public just because you retire from farming. You have all the crops you previously harvested...and the land is there to grow future crops that your kids farm...or they sell the farm.

If a book/story still has economic value...why shouldn’t the copyright holder continue to benefit? The public did nothing to create the work so why should they confiscate the economic value from the heirs or the owner?

You compare apples and bananas. Yes, both are white inside, but that's pretty much the only similarity. Physical property rights have been around as long as Grok decided to stay in this cave for a while. It was his cave for as long as he could throw rocks at whomever else wanted it. People have been telling stories for just about as long, but no one ever thought that the story belonged to any individual.

Move forward a bit. Mankind started living in villages. You build your house, usually with the help of your extended family and neighbors. If someone comes to try to take your food or house, your extended family and neighbors helped you protect it. People still told stories and still no one thought that the story belonged to any individual.

Move forward some 8,000 years. People live in complex societies. Rules had been long established that your physical property was your own and people should not take it. People still told stories and still no one thought that the story belonged to any individual. Stories were written down. Rich people hired scribes to make copies of works they enjoyed. People owned libraries. And still no one thought the story belonged to the author.

Then the printing press was invented. It was a costly piece of equipment and usually only a small group of people owned one, the publishers. People still didn't think that the story belonged to the author. Rulers started to hand out monopolies to individual publisher. You and only you can print new copies of the Bible. Still no one thought that a story belonged to an individual person.

Eventually we get to England in the late 1600's. Publishers still had monopolies. The Printer's Guild was the only group allowed to print books. Authors would sell their work to a publisher. Enough influential people were writing works that people started to say that maybe the author should get a piece of that monopoly, otherwise, only the rich can afford to write. New works are a good thing. Let's assign the monopoly to the authors, not the publisher. They trotted out the story of John Milton's starving grand daughter to help sell the idea.

Eventually, in the late 1800's, a very wealthy author, Victor Hugo, got hacked off that his works were being sold outside of France and he wasn't seeing a dime of it and decided to do something about it. Thus the modern idea of super long term copyrights. The US didn't buy into this until the mid 1970's, when music and movie companies started to notice that they could make a pretty penny in the international market and gee wouldn't it be nice if we could get someone else to force people to pay us money for our music and movies.

This is the difference. Physical property rights have been around since mankind started living in groups. It's necessary for people to live together. The idea that the first person to tell a story owns that story? It's still not accepted in many parts of the world.

[tubemonkey]

Intellectual property rights should be treated in the same manner as physical property rights.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Intellectual property rights should be treated in the same manner as physical property rights.

You keep asserting this without providing any argument about why it should be so. Physical property rights is necessary for people to live in close proximity to each other. While it can be argued, indeed it is embedded in the US Constitution, that copyright and patents, need short term protection to encourage the arts and sciences, it is more plan that for the arts and sciences to improve, society needs the ability to build on the previous works. You can't build a better mouse trap if the rights to all mouse traps for eternity belong to the guy who first patented a mouse trap. We would not be singing the US anthem if the copyrights to "To Anacreon in Heaven" were still in effect.

I can protect my house by being there with a shotgun. How do I prevent people from making a copy of a book I right or singing a song I write? That is why physical property and what you call intellectual property are treated differently.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Intellectual property rights should be treated in the same manner as physical property rights.

Exactly. I’m not debating how things ARE or how things “got here”....but what they SHOULD be.

And I distinguish copywriter from patent...particularly as it relates to books. There are only so many viable ways to make a hinge (for example)....there is an infinite number of ways to create fiction.

[Quoth]

There are even different kinds of Intellectual Property. All of them need quite different treatment to physical property.

I can make a copy of your old house or garden and many other things without depriving anyone. I can easily make copies even of a paper book and mass produce it. That deprives the author and publisher.
If I have more money I can copy an Intel CPU or ARM CPU and mass produce. That doesn't just deprive them of sales but removes incentive to spend millions on R&D if it's simply copied.

DRM and DMCA are though evil. It's trivial for any "pirate" producer to copy a BluRay (point HD camera at a 4K screen in the dark) or audio book, or encrypted audio or video streaming or broadcast. DRM & DMCA simply make life hard for ordinary users, taking away rights they had under ordinary Patent and Copyright laws. Corporate abuse. Adds cost to all HW (the royalty encumbered decoding and the HW/SW). About illegal exploitation of markets (c.f. EU sales vs USA sales) and making people buy the same content multiple times.

USA Design Patent = UK Registered Design.
There is problem with how USPTO does patent awarding and Software should only be copyright, never subject to patent.

But it's fantasy to suppose physical objects and Intellectual content can be remotely treated the same!

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

You keep asserting this without providing any argument about why it should be so. Physical property rights is necessary for people to live in close proximity to each other. While it can be argued, indeed it is embedded in the US Constitution, that copyright and patents, need short term protection to encourage the arts and sciences, it is more plan that for the arts and sciences to improve, society needs the ability to build on the previous works. You can't build a better mouse trap if the rights to all mouse traps for eternity belong to the guy who first patented a mouse trap. We would not be singing the US anthem if the copyrights to "To Anacreon in Heaven" were still in effect.

I can protect my house by being there with a shotgun. How do I prevent people from making a copy of a book I right or singing a song I write? That is why physical property and what you call intellectual property are treated differently.

Why shouldn't it? Why should Disney be forced to give away Mickey Mouse? There's nothing stopping anyone from creating their own anthropomorphic critter and making money off it. How is society benefited by stealing Disney's critter and depriving them of future profits? Is imagination is so limited that Mickey is the only mouse in the entire universe that people can write books and make movies about?

Putting Mickey in the public domain is nothing more than a greedy power grab to limit Disney's profits and allow others to profit off of his creation.