this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Copyright should last 9 years and only be owned by humans, never companies.
So when Bethesda makes a new Skyrim, Todd Howard should personally own the whole thing?
Yes, or parts of the game owned by different individuals. They can have a contract to use their intellectual property only for Bethesda’s uses.
Even if it was owned by one person at the company, that’s no different than the company owning it. But since it’s owned by a finite being instead of an eternal entity, so it makes it clearer that copyright should also be finite.
Copyright is already finite.
Copyright initially held by a company expires 95 years from the year of its first publication or 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever comes first.
Copyright initially held by an individual expires 70 years after the individual dies. That could easily be a longer period than company-held copyright.
I say, just reducing that time, or make it case dependent would be a great start
That would certainly benefit companies developing generative AI. The sooner something loses copyright protection, the easier it is to use it as training data.
Big AI companies already have that data used, and copyright is mostly a concern for the openSource models.
AI companies that used copyrighted data without paying are facing multiple lawsuits. Those lawsuits would go away if copyright went away.
There’s no limit on lengthening copyright. Currently it’s 95/120 years, but that can always change (and did for many years of lengthening).
A collection of humans could form a company for ease of managing and sharing the copyright.
But then they might try to claim the copyright lasts until the last one dies and then keep swapping in young people to keep it going forever. Pretty much like they do today.
That's not how copyright works (at least not in the US). when a corporation creates a copyrighted work (by way of paying the person(s) that actually made it), the duration is set as 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. The lifetime of any employee is not taken into account. When a copyright is made by a person, it lasts until 70 years after that person dies. You cannot swap out that person for someone else, even if the owner of the copyright changes.
You are probably thinking of a method that is used to make private agreements last basically forever. A private contract technically isn't allowed to last forever, there has to be some point of expiration. To make a contract last forever anyway, they pick some condition that probably won't happen for a ridiculous amount of time, such as when the last descendant of the king of England dies (I assume they use this because the royal family keeps good genealogy records). If a currently living person is required, they might pick some infant relative to make it last as long as possible.
For decades, copyright only increased in length in the U.S., and there’s nothing stopping them from extending it again.
It needs to go the other way, and it needs to be attached to the creative person responsible.
The inclusion of copyright in the constitution is for encouraging creativity. A short monopoly is all that’s needed. Anything more is just greed and does nothing to support more creativity.
So if you want the copyright of a work to expire, you need to arrange for the death of the sole copyright holder
Well, it should expire at 9 years after the work was made, but to reinforce that, it should be owned by a finite being.
If that one person dies, then there's no one with a stake in enforcing the copyright.
9 years also seems really short. There are sequels that come out far more than 9 years after the original work.
Sounds like motivation to get the sequel done sooner.