Comment on abandonware empires
sj_zero 1 year ago
Originally copyright was like 15 years and if the thing was really good for you then you could Apply for a second 15 year term.
30 years is a long time to get a monopoly over something. As a human being, 30 years is a significant part of your entire lifetime. From birth to 30 years you have your entire childhood, many people go to and finish college, get married, have kids, achieve a degree of professional success. Another 30 years from that moment, many people are at the end of their lives. They're retiring, some who smoked or did other things are dying of old people diseases.
I believe strongly enough that 15 years is a reasonable copyright term that my book, the graysonian ethic, which I published in 2021, has a note on the legal page releasing it to the public domain 15 years from the first date of publishing, and in jurisdictions where you can't do that, it's licensed under the creative Commons zero license
If I want to own the rights to another book, I can write another book. If I can't make back the money that I spent writing and publishing it in 15 years, then that's a me problem, not a society problem the police can help enforce.
The famous song Happy Birthday left copyright only a couple years ago, and not because it timed out. The song which was written in the era of my great grandparents only lost protection from the largest state in history because after a hundred years no one could keep track of who owned it anymore.
Honestly, the only silver lining of Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney over anti-gay legislation is that the Republicans might end up undoing all the copyright extensions Disney lobbied for over the past few decades.
Disney is largely to blame for America’s copyright laws being so fucked.
Honestly, the less special treatment any one corporation gets, or the less special treatment corporations as a whole get, that's a win for everyone else in society.
Most people on both sides of the aisle if you stepped away from the specific political situation would agree that companies should not be allowed to form their own municipal governments, either.
I think part of the problem is that it is very dependent on what the invention is. Yeah, for some nicknack, that’s a reasonable time frame. But for some kind of massive project, where distribution, complicated supply chains, and many people are involved, this time gets eaten up quick. Imagine you have an invention, thats totally cool, but 10 years of your time is taken up trying to make it at scale to make it profitable? Meanwhile, someone else can establish all those things without breaking patent, and go to market as your patent closes. You aren’t wrong, its just not always so simple.
Copyright isn't patents. I think patents are presently 20 years, nowhere near the lifetime + 70 years of copyrights.
nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
Oh, don’t hurt me like that, please…