Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.

Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.

My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.

There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.

Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.

If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.

This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")

No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.

Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.

It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.

But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.

I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?

So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.

No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.

Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.

Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.

No, that's fine. Remember, it's not just Hollywood that does that; everyone can and does. For example, the Wicked movie just came out, which is the film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel which came out in 1995, which in turn was a derivative work based on the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 which has been in the public domain since 1956. (Although Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, did put in a few elements from the still-copyrighted 1939 film, but little enough as to not matter -- mainly just the Witch's green skin)

This is all exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage: authors -- and songwriters, and performers, and filmmakers -- creating new works derived from older works just as much as we encourage them to create new original works. The main thing is to get more works created, of any kind -- sheer quantity is the only way to get more works of quality.

There already is a fork. https://classicpress.net/

It was started when Mullenweg pushed Gutenberg down everyone's throats.

I would suggest that the iTunes Music Store and music and video streaming services are why you don't see much of this any more. Not only was it a bad look, and expensive (Joe Sixpack pirates are not going to be able to pay much, however big the judgment is), and not effective at stopping piracy, but it turns out that the best way to reduce piracy is to provide inexpensive alternatives since piracy is largely the result of market conditions.

Anyway, no need to take my word for this; here's an actual circuit court opinion from the Napster case:

Wasn't trying to, but if it helps, the penalties are equal across the board. Downloaders, being individuals, may feel it worse than an infringing business with greater assets, but whatcha gonna do.

I vaguely recall that it has survived such challenges, though I'll let you research it instead of doing more work for you. I see no likelihood that statutory damages for copyright infringement will be held unconstitutional in any respect.

The only purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science by encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not have created and published, where those works are in the public domain as thoroughly as possible as rapidly as possible.

It would be nice if we could tailor it to each individual author down to the second and down to the bare minimum of rights, so that they are given the exact amount of incentive needed and not one iota more but that's impractical.

A year is plenty of time for many works -- a news article, for example, is only commercially relevant for somewhere between a day and a week, and the value of reprints or archival access isn't enough that it would not have been created and published if the term were short.

Anyway, I'm also not saying you only get one year. I'm saying you get a term of one year but can renew for another year, and another, etc. but in one-year increments. This is about as fine as we can reasonably chop up the time.

Authors -- presumably -- can be trusted to file their taxes every year, and to renew their car registration every year, and so forth. Annually filing a very simple form with a token payment (I'd be happy with $1; just not free) to renew a copyright is not burdensome. Especially if we're requiring registration as a strict formality.

The number of renewals might vary depending on the kind of work from zero (newspaper) to 15 or 20 (motion picture) based on how much incentive it tends to take for that sort of work to be created and published.

And if a copyright holder fails to renew timely when they could have the work enters the public domain all the sooner.

No. Remember, a "copy" is defined in 17 USC 101 as a material object, containing the intangible work. Much as the 3D printing folks would love to be able to download material objects, they just won't fit in an Ethernet cord, much less a WiFi signal.

When you download, you, the downloader, are fixing the work into your computer's storage device. That device -- usually a hard drive or SSD -- is the copy, and the downloader is the one responsible. (Leaving it on a RAM disk wouldn't help; then the RAM is the copy since it's not simply passing through briefly in that scenario)

This was all gone into fairly well back in the Napster era.

No. You need to take a look at 17 USC 501, which defines infringement as any violation of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. Copying is exactly as much an exclusive right under 17 USC 106 as distribution. But possession isn't actually one of those rights. A downloader is breaking the law by being the person responsible for downloading (no one forced them to do it, or took control of their computer and made it download stuff) which is the making of a copy. Mere possession of an unlawfully made copy is not infringing -- there is no exclusive right of possession. But as noted, since a copy is a tangible object, you'd have to find a disc or drive lying around on the ground -- you can't download things onto a medium yourself.

Criminal infringement is defined at 17 USC 506 -- it's basically just a matter of degree. If you infringe a lot in a brief period, now it's a crime. Or if it's done for commercial gain, or if it's a work not yet released to the public.

Nope. For the sorts of works people usually pirate, they've been registered timely relative to the infringement, and so now remedies available under 17 USC 504 include statutory damages, which do not require proof and which are $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, and can jump up to as high as $150,000 per work if the infringement was willful, which it almost always is. An 'innocent' infringement drops the minimum to $200 per work but it's rare that an infringer, even a downloader, can prove that they qualify for that.

Clever plaintiffs will only ask for the $750 minimum per work -- but for thousands and thousands of works -- to remove the determination of the amount of damages from jury consideration, but still squash the defendant. The Tatelbaum case back around 2010 or so was a good example as I recall. Also he had a crummy lawyer, but that's no excuse.

I feel like you haven't actually read the Copyright Act much less relevant case law. If you're going to make these claims about what is or isn't illegal and what the penalties are, you really should become familiar with it first. Don't make crap up, especially if you're understating the law which might result in people breaking it. Which is super easy for copyright which is a strict liability statute, and so your mens rea doesn't usually matter.

Feh. Make it 1 year, renewable in 1 year terms if the copyright holder cares to do so for a token cost and only up to a modest number of renewals. I don't like your sequel idea at all; two books in one series are not one work.

There have been a number of term extensions but whatever you're writing there is wildly off.

There is no article 11 of the US Constitution. Care to give it a read and try again?

The copyright and patent clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) isn't about fostering the creative arts either. It's about serving the public interest by promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, but not about promoting progress at all costs.

Also, the right to lend a hard copy of a book only applies if the copy was made lawfully; you cannot lend or sell copies that were made illegally.

It was the correct decision under the law though we are saddled with lousy policy and lousy statutes.

No, he's quite right. Copyright includes the right to make new copies (a copy is when a work is embodied in a tangible medium for more than a brief moment, basically, so downloaded into a hard drive, for example), to distribute copies (which uploading technically isn't but it always gets treated that way), and publicly performing or displaying works (which includes when even just one member of the public looks at or watches a work remotely).

They were really obviously infringing, and I don't know why they thought they'd get away with it. And your example doesn't help; using a webcam to read a book would infringe the public display right if nothing else.