A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.
I agree with you that 10 years is more than enough time for corporations to turn a healthy profit on something (not that they can't continue to make money off of a work after it has entered the public domain), but this wasn't a small victory.
If every ISP were at risk of being on the hook for endless billions in damages because of what their users did it would mean that ISPs would be forced to give in to the RIAA/MPAs demands to permanently terminate the accounts of internet users over completely unproven (and often inaccurate) accusations of piracy. It's worth noting that cox was actually already doing this in a limited number of circumstances, and the media industry still wasn't satisfied.
The media industry insisted that they needed the power to get people's accounts terminated even though it would have left many people, including fully innocent ones, cut off from the internet entirely. This was a big deal, and I'm honestly surprised to see this supreme court do the right thing.
I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be around $70.5k renewal. At 50 years it'd be $50 million. At 75 years it'd be $35 billion. Fixed amount and exponential can of course be shifted around here but the idea would be to encourage creators to use works hard and if they couldn't make it work not sit on them but release them. Once in awhile something would be such a big hit it'd be worth keeping a long time, and that's ok, but society gets its due too. And most works would be allowed to lapse as they stopped being worth it.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
I still believe IP shouldn’t be protected by courts unless property taxes are paid on it. The IP holder should declare its taxable value, and that value should be its declared value in an infringement lawsuit. Oh, you said that movie was worth $1 for tax purposes? Now you can’t sue for more than $1 if someone copies it. You want to sue for $1B in damages? Ok, but plan on paying taxes on $1B.
I think that's a horrible idea. There's zero benefit to society in letting corporations like Disney that can afford to pay keep works out of the public domain longer than others.
Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.
How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?
> Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.
I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"
Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)
The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.
i understand your logic , but there's a problem with that assertion.
the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value . That thinking is flawed. If anything, the copyright owner contributed to the equity accrued to the copyright. They should be able to pay the high price to keep adding value to it. This does not discriminate. IN fact, i would say the opposite, what you are proposing, feels like stealing.
If i dump millions into developing a copyrighted work, why could any random artist with nothing to lose be able to exploit the work by paying a small/no fee? This seems incredibly unfair. Do you agree?
With an increasing cost for age, they would eventually be paying an absurd amount for content of decreasing value. Either they end up funding the government massively, or they decide to drop commercially irrelevant copyright.
> Disney are able to pay that amount because their IP is still generating massive income.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
Another thing that doesn't get brought up enough: Copyright is not really needed to encourage creation.
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
You're absolutely right that artists can't stop themselves from creating, but I think that a reasonable amount of protection still does encourage more works.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
IMO, copyright is something that should be shorter the bigger the media producer is.
The reason we need a copyright in the first place is to stop someone like disney just vacuuming up popular works and republishing them because they have the money to do it.
Disney, however, doesn't need almost any copyright to still encourage them to make new products. They'll do that regardless.
For an individual author, copyright should basically be for their lifetime. If they sell it, the copyright should only last 5 years after that.
A company like disney should get copyrights for like 1 year.
But also the type of media matters. IMO, news outlets and journalists should get copyrights for 1 day max. Old news is almost worthless and it's in the public interest that news be generally accessible and recordable.
Disney didn't invent (e.g.) Beauty and the Beast. They took an idea and a story in the public domain and retold it. Then they claim ownership of that and sue anyone who uses the same character(s) for the next 75+ years.
This is not "encouraging creation". This is strip-mining our shared culture.
So yeah, agree 100% that this kind of corporate theft needs to be stopped. I can't see that happening in the face of all the money though.
With respect - copyright's protection of income is the point
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
> That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
The tool used was control over distribution. If income was the point copyright law could just hand tax payer money over to anyone who created something. That'd guarantee income instead of the system we have which allows artists to invest in the creation of a work and still never make a dime on it. Ultimately though, I do see your point and I agree that making it possible to earn enough money to justify the creation, publishing, and distribution of a creative work was a large part of the intention along with the establishment of the public domain.
I probably should have phrased that as "The point of copyright isn't to protect income until the work is no longer highly profitable"
How does getting tons of money from Disney into a government's tax coffers not benefit society? That's money that the government wouldn't need to directly collect from citizens other ways.
If Disney had to pay the federal government a few billion each to keep absolute control over their oldest works, every year, no tax games, that would be pretty great for society. But it's also probably true that the tax games would indeed ensue. Something something low trust, we can't have nice things.
>I think I like the idea, but I can't help wondering if it would have unforeseen consequences.
As I said in a sibling comment, quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion as opposed to "final bill that has been revised in committee and is going to the floor for a full vote". The details of implementation are certainly critical, and not trivial either! I'm fully in support of thinking through various use cases. But part of why I'm interested in alternate approaches is that they might give us finer grained tools.
>Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
I have actually considered that as well but didn't add it into a quickie comment. If we take the second path of approaches I listed there, then thinking about it all open source software would fall under a special even more permissive class of the tier 3, in that it already has "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing for all right? Except that it's also free. The motivation here is the "advancement of the useful arts & sciences" and the public good, so having it be explicit that "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
All that said, I'll also ask fwiw if it'd even be that big a deal given the pace of development? I do think it'd be both ideal and justified if OSS had a longer period for free, that's still a square deal to the public IMO. But like, even if an OSS work went out protection (and keep in mind that a motivated community that could raise even a few thousand dollars would be able to just pay for an extra decade no problem, the cost doesn't really ramp up for awhile [which might itself be considered a flaw?]) after 10 years, how much is it worth it that 2016 era OSS (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window) now could have proprietary works be worth it against 10 year old proprietary software all getting pushed into the public domain far faster? That's worth some contemplation. Maybe requiring that source/assets be provided to the Library of Congress or something and is released at the same time the work loses copyright would be a good balance, having all that available for down the road would be a huge win vs what we've seen up until now.
> quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion
Agreed, and my comment was aimed at exactly that. :)
An example of my concern: What would happen to GPL-licensed software if the copyright expired quickly? Would that allow someone to include it in a proprietary product and (after the short copyright term ended) deny users the freedoms that the GPL is supposed to guarantee? I think those freedoms remain important for much longer than 10 years.
> (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window)
Do you mean that the copyright term countdown would reset whenever the author makes changes to their work? (I'm not sure if this is the case today.) If so, couldn't someone simply use an earlier version in their proprietary product in order to escape GPL obligations early?
> "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
Yes, I think this makes sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion
Indeed.
Setting aside variable details like time frames and cost structures which can be debated separately, what I found interesting about your suggestion is it's a mechanism to create an escalating incentive for copyright holders to relinquish copyrights even sooner than the standard copyright period. Currently, no matter what the term length, it costs nothing to sit on a copyright until it expires - so everyone does - even if they never do anything with the copyright. And the copyright exists even if the company goes bankrupt or the copyright holder dies. Thus we end up with zombie copyrights which keep lurking in the dark for works which are almost certainly abandon-ware or orphan-ware simply because our current system defaults to one-and-done granting of "life of the inventor + 70 years" for everything.
Obviously, we should dramatically shorten the standard copyright length but no matter what we shorten it to (10, 15, 20 yrs etc) we should consider requiring some recurring renewal before expiration as a separate idea. Even if it's just paying a small processing fee and sending in simple DIY form, it sets the do-nothing-default to "auto-expire" for things the inventor doesn't care about (and may even have forgotten about). That's a net benefit to society we should evaluate separately from debates about term lengths.
I see your suggestion about automatically escalating the cost of recurring renewal as another separate layer worth considering on its own merits. My guess would be just requiring any recurring renewal would cause around half of all copyrights to auto-expire before reaching their full term - even if the renewal stayed $10. The idea of having recurring renewal costs escalate, regardless of when the escalation kicks in, or how much it escalates, is a mechanism which could achieve even more net positive societal benefits by increasing the incentive to relinquish copyrights sooner.
An adversarial approach would also be interesting: People could open positions of "I would buy a right to use this copyright for $XYZ if it was released today"
So the copyright holder would have the option to EITHER cashout at any point (and consider the work/invested effort paid) OR counter-bid the sum of everyone to keep it.
Not sure about the implications, but it would encourage the most (economically) productive route
I'm a big proponent of compulsory licensing, which could certainly be limited to renewals so that creative control is still granted for some amount of time.
No, the problem with this is that a lot of IPs aren't profitable in their initial years, and this pretty strictly encourages property-holding as a business. That's exactly the wrong kind of revenue generation that copyright is supposed to be encouraging. It's empty rent-seeking.
Further, I think that the premise is flawed. Rather than being more protected by being profitable, a work should be less protected the more it has profited the owners. If you can make $50 million profit as an individual from your creative work that took 5 years to produce, then you're done. Dozens of lifetimes of wealth for 5 years of work? No, that's more than enough. You don't deserve more money for that. You have been suitably encouraged. The trouble with that idea is that "creative accounting" is too easy, so that won't really work, either.
I think it should match patent law. 20 years, and that's it. After that, if you want to keep making profit, you need to make something new. Because that's what it's supposed to do: let you make a living if you're able, and encourage you to keep working to create more.
How about something like IP as a tax? IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
I want to be super clear that I'm not proposing some finalized plan or numbers here, it'd need some real work spent hashing it all out. Mainly though I hope people will consider more the huge space of untapped approaches to balancing various benefits and costs towards a better societal outcome. And that maybe that helps a little in getting us out of some of the present seemingly intractable boxes we so often seem stuck in?
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.
When old art gets a revival like that it's usually because the work is being reused (e.g. song used in an ad, Tv show, movie), something that costs time and money to license when done legally. How many artists lost their chances because navigating copyright is tedious and expensive?
That's how you end up with "Hollywood accounting" where movies that gross over 100M dollars still show as a "loss" for tax purposes via creative accounting methods.
Yep, I've been proposing a similar system literally for decades now in online discussions like this. If you dig through Slashdot posts from 20 years ago, you might find something from me saying something similar.
It makes sense too: some things just aren't very profitable, and some are. If it's really worth it to the creator, they can pay for it. If they want to keep it locked up for 75 years, they better be prepared to pay very handsomely.
One problem I see with this system is: how does someone know if what they're trying to copy is protected by copyright or not? The government would have to maintain a public database to query. Another possible problem is the Berne convention, which harmonizes copyright across countries.
This could lead to a broader culture, because the most popular works would get long copyright protection terms, while the relatively unpopular ones would get short protection terms. People would be more likely to use those unpopular works and perhaps breathe new life into them.
Eg imagine if this is how the system worked right now. You could have streamers watch unpopular (modern) movies with their audience. Or a youtuber could read a book to their viewers (listeners). And it wouldn't have to be content that's 100+ years out of date.
You could also make it so that when the copyright protection first expires then a percentage of the income earned through the use of the work gets paid to the author for some number of years. Eg you're free to use the work, but you've got to pay some percentage of the revenue to the author for 10 years.
At this stage I just want a coherent system. There is no way "individuals can have their accounts terminated for one song" and "AI companies can download a complete copy of everything, including pirated works, and roll it into models which can reproduce it exactly and sell it back to you" should be able to co-exist.
The reason copyright doesn't get fixed or removed is largely because the general public is worried more about other things and the big rightsholders continue their monthly payments—err, lobbying.
Though AI might change that. In the end, large corporations get what they want.
The general public also get sold on the rosy idea that copyright (and patents to a certain extent), protect the little guy, that thanks to this mechanism their work will not be stolen by opportunistic freeloaders. It also resonates with the "one day I will strike rich" mentality.
What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.
The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.
I'm not sure that's the correct approach. Why do you want to have free access to other people's books, movies, and songs in the first place? I have the feeling that's not the case, but what is it then?
Disagree on the decade. There are plenty of examples of great movies or other works that took longer than a decade to bring to the public. Those projects would have been completely non-viable if their content could have been stolen after creators put a decade into their development.
I think 25 or even 50 years is more defensible. But 100? Nah.
But the crushing problem today for many of us here is SOFTWARE PATENTS. These should never have been allowed in the first place; and until their scourge is abolished, everyone is at risk for having his work stolen with one.
The timer on copyright starts once a work is published, not when the work is first started. So works that spend a decade or more in development would be unaffected by this.
The usual way to do that is to have renewals or other periods; then things that are abandoned fall out of copyright, but things that the author is alive to protect remain in.
It's moderately hard to build a law based on what people think is "fair" mainly because fairness often has more to do with feelings (it would be fair for someone to make a Hobbit movie because the author is long dead; it would be unfair for someone to make a Potter movie because the author is alive, etc) than with an easily quantifiable rule.
I've often thought the solution is to define copyright (of things published, not trade secrets and unpublished works) as being something that can ONLY be defended as long as the work is "available" in the marketplace for "reasonable" amounts. As long as Warner Bros or whoever it is keeps selling the Lord of the Rings (extended edition) on DVD or whatever, they can j'accuse infringers of downloading it.
But ten years after it's no longer in print? No longer in copyright, either.
In a world where copyright only lasts 10 years, what happens to the musician whose song from 20 years ago is used in a movie and becomes super popular? Do they get royalties or are there no royalties involved?
I want a system that doesn't syphon money to the corporations over the individual creator and the corporations can't tell me I can't use the song.
No royalties, as the 20-year-old song would be in the public domain, so no one can tell anyone they can't use the song. The vast majority of songs that make a profit will do so within the first few years, with almost or actually nothing after 10 years. The copyright system should optimise for public benefit and the vast majority of works, rather than the tiny number of big successes.
The constitutionally defined purpose of copyright is:
"... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I don't understand how "person X created this so anyone who does something similar has to pay him and his kin for all eternity" promotes progress. In fact, it does the exact opposite - at some point you can't do or say anything through any persistent media without paying legions of lawyers, trusts, and corporate entities.
The bondage of intellectual property forces very particular branches of human development to the exclusion of others. It's no surprise that restriction of thought and creativity - and most of all, music - is to be found alongside war and predation and uninspired leadership.
I think it should be for a lifetime of the original author and non-transferable. The system is already rigged very much against artists, it's amazing how many people still contribute to culture under the given conditions. I don't see any reason why someone who writes a Christmas song or a novel shouldn't have a possibility to get payments for their works until they die, for example. However, I have a lot of problems with the bizarre extensions that companies and heirs have gotten for work they haven't created on their own.
IANAL but it seems to have major implications beyond music piracy, like into the realm of ISPs and free speech in general, it seems the court (rightly) sees ISPs as a common carrier (like water pipes) and we may see more opinions of the kind that reach into the space of monopolies or duopolies in social media next.
Big tech should loose its safe harbor protection. It’s both an aggregator AND a curator. The algorithms showing you what to see is no different than a newspaper editor. Just like newspapers big tech should be liable for their “feeds” showing harmful and defamatory information
I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
I think the difference should be whether they are a dumb pipe, or whether they exercise editorial control and/or promote some content over others.
If you are truly a dumb pipe, that just transmits whatever the users post, then you shouldn't be liable for what goes over your wires. Like the phone company.
As soon as you start acting as an editor: amplifying some content and downplaying (or removing) other content, re-ordering it, ranking it, and so on, then you are placing your name on the content and in a sense should share liability around it.
Companies should have to deliberately decide who they are going to be: are they just wires like the phone company, or are they a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor department? They shouldn't be able to act like one, but have the liability of the other.
That seems unworkable because, well, I just don’t want social media to be dumb pipes. Without sites making editorial decisions every site will be full of porn and animal torture videos. The current status quo seems way better tbh.
I would be happy if congress passed a law saying a social media has no liability for anything their users post as long as the algorithm is completely open source. If we had social media like that, they'd even have APIs that let users design their own algorithm and we'd see a golden age of social media emerge from it. Twitter seems to moving in this direction but they enjoy no legal protections from being open at the moment. Blusky is already this way I believe, but without a neutral and trusted centralized control it's a bit different of an animal.
what if the creator is a company? They are allowed to hold copyrights.
Though one answers is: 95/120 years.
"If the work is a joint work, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire and anonymous or pseudonymous works, copyright protection is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter"
What is "financially viable"? Just hoarding copyrighted materials and not distributing them in order to create artificial scarcity could meet that criteria.
It was originally 14 years back in 1790 when publishing anything was expensive, distribution was difficult, and worldwide distribution was nearly impossible. Today you can publish works across the globe at close to the speed of light and at very little cost. 10 years seems pretty damn reasonable.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works and allowing people creative access to their own culture accomplishes that goal a whole lot better than protecting the profits of corporations for ~100 years.
Copyright is an artificial monopoly set in place to guarantee that artists get a piece of the cake from distributors. The duration of this monopoly is completely arbitrary, and ideally it should be "long enough to make art creation a viable trade".
ideally it should be "long enough to make art creation a viable trade"
And, IMO, 10 years is in the ballpark for that to be true. That's ~5 major pieces of art as a minimum for a popular artist to have a career (assuming their 20s through 60s) [assuming each protected piece can sustain them for a decade].
I'd expect most people in this forum have made something "worth protecting" or even make a living doing so. Certainly it's been my career. I still think we should drastically shorten copyrights and expect more to grant it. e.g. for software, require source escrow to the copyright office and probably require source availability to purchasers, and ban things like hardware that only runs signed software. Basically the law should be GPL without redistribution, but where you could hire a programmer to fix things for you and maybe share your diff. Or just straight GPL (i.e. software should not be eligible for copyright as it's a functional thing, not a creative thing, and consumer protection law should make it mandatory to provide source and a way to load your own version for any device that has it). For other works, registration fees should cover storage of a master copy until expiration + N years so it can be released to the public. Maybe "source material" there as well wherever it makes sense. I understand that might make my career less lucrative. That's fine.
Whoever drafts the law has to arbitrarily choose a number, or there will be no end of litigation to settle it, and a judge will arbitrarily choose a number. OP's opinion is "not more than 10" so 9, 8 and 1 would all be fine with them, while 11 would be too long. Source: reading. Meanwhile you haven't even made clear where you stand on the issue or what point you're making or in what way "differently" OP is supposed to feel.
I think I've made plenty and I don't feel differently.
You could ask the same questions about the actual duration of copyrights as they are today. You present those rhetorical questions as if they were some argument against this proposal, but they're just things you need to think about regardless of what scheme you come up with: why this, and why not something else? It's not like "life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from creation" is any less arbitrary.
We should remember that the purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is explicitly, per the US Constitution, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...." The purpose is not to ensure that creators can keep collecting money decades after they created their works. It may be useful to ensure that as a way to promote progress, but it's just a tool, not the goal. If progress is better promoted with a 10-minute copyright term then we should do that instead.
What are you talking about, have you tried to exist in America without a credit score? It absolutely is an American principle, just because it's not explicitly stated in the constitution doesn't mean it's not true.
Valve is one of the only companies that appears to understand this, as well as that individual productivity is almost always limited by communication bandwidth, and communication burden is exponential as nodes in the tree/mesh grow linearly. [or some derated exponent since it doesn't need to be fully connected]
The ‘design everything as a publicly accessible API’ directive seems to play to this as well. If all your data / services are available and must be documented then a lot of communication overhead can be eliminated.
For anyone who doesn't know what you mean, here's an archived copy of Steve Yegge's post about this directive + other musings comparing Amazon vs Google (which is how a lot of us came to find out about this, via Yegge's write-up): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102800
Copied the most relevant snippet below
---
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.
Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:
- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.
- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.
- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.
- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.
- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.
That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.
This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.
At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.
That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
> You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, we were making it a platform in small ways long before that edict from Bezos. But because it used to be only an online bookstore, the footprint was a lot smaller.
1. the external interface was ... HTTP
2. the pages were designed to be easily machine parsable
3. you could queue up search queries that amzn would run on its own hardware, and notify you of the results asynchronously.
Sure, this didn't look anything like the things Yegge is describing, but the idea that "it's a platform, dummies" was some new revelation is misleading.
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
For someone that doesn’t know about this, how does a CDN help? Don’t they still have to pay for all the data downloaded even if it’s hosted on a CDN. I thought the whole purpose of a CDN was just to make access quicker and had nothing to do with saving on bandwidth costs.
Lego is still the best toy, but man, I really miss the old style Technic sets where most of the pieces were very generic vs today's sets which are less versatile. 8480 and 8250 as examples (my two favorite sets growing up, though I didn't manage to get my hands on 8480 until I got my first job)
I collect Hot Wheels but have always found Lego to be annoying.
It's a pain in the ass to put together, pain in the ass to move, pain in the ass to collection. The costs are out of this world and most collectors don't even build their sets, they keep it in the box from 20 years ago. At least with Hot Wheels you can see the car inside even when still packaged.
Yeah that's a completely different approach, I buy lego to have access to more pieces so that when I dump them all on the floor and build whatever comes to mind I have more to play with.
What do you mean far behind? Far behind what? The new (actually the old one too) Qwen can give you bounding rectangular prisms around things in a scene, OCR text with ink spilled on it correctly, read graphs and understand spatial relationships, I think it's pretty impressive for something I'm running on like a 5 year old GPU.
yeah i know lol, that’s kind of my point. impressive that it runs on your gpu, but it still can’t tell you what happens if you tilt a glass. that’s what world models are working toward. but even then..so what? you get a perfect simulator. it knows the glass tips. it still doesn’t know why someone tipped it, or what happens if they don’t. A four year old can do this and we’re just barely on step one and a half.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article?
I get that it's frustrating - that's what open source allows though. I used to run a blog. I ran a few websites, open sourced, that were similar in a general way (users can make stuff on the site and share it others). I found the site duplicated. In fact it's still duplicated to this day. Oh well.
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