Optimum Copyright Period Decided by Math 442
An anonymous reader writes "So how long should a copyright be valid for? A Cambridge student has stepped into the discussion with a dispassionately calculated estimate of the optimal period a copyright should be granted. Ars' point of view: 'Neither the US nor the UK are in any danger of rethinking copyright law from scratch, but if they were looking for guidance in how to set up their systems, Pollock has it. He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).' The original paper is available (pdf) online."
B b b but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dispassionate (Score:5, Insightful)
So we need to plan for that. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have have property that you want protected, then you should PAY for that protection after the standard protection period has expired.
99%+ of book titles won't be sold 15 years after their release. So there's no financial incentive for their authors to protect them. But with Disney and others, their "property" is worth millions of dollars. So charge them 5% of the estimated value. Every year.
If you are an author and you want to keep protecting your book, are you willing to pay 5% a year of the sales from the last year? Or should it be 1%?
Otherwise it falls into the Public Domain.
prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the United States... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So we need to plan for that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In the United States... (Score:4, Insightful)
They're also into music and movies, and file trading, and all these things are impacted by long copyrights. Things like Google's "Scan every library in existence" scheme could be infinitely cooler if your search would bring you the full text of the actual book, and it could do that for a vast number of books if the copyrights were relaxed.
Photography is an excellent example (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:B b b but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not completely ignored... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proving once again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Regulations don't make things "optimal" (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at what Prince just did [google.com] -- he disturbed the distribution monopoly's hold on music sales, and they're PO'd about it. Instead of hoping for sales for an album he knows is already online and in the hands of fans, he used the music he created as a "loss leader" to drive sales to a market he can control -- his own time. Instead of hoping to make millions on an album (which anyone can copy, using their own time, their own equipment), he can now make millions selling something unique -- HIS time in front of his fans.
Albums are quickly becoming marketing structures to get people to attend your live performances. Many new bands give away their music via MySpace and PureVolume in hopes of getting people to come to their shows -- where they make the actual dollars doing actual labor on an ongoing basis.
I'm an artist, and I produce some musical acts myself. I've convinced most, if not all, to tell their crowds to go and copy the album they buy at the show for friends, so that the band has a bigger pull the next time they're in town. My own brother's band, Maps & Atlases, is now doing that to great acclaim (MTV2, college radio, and a large tour pending) with hopes of making their money on beer cuts, T-shirt sales, etc. Copyright is useless to them. They won't sign a contract to the various labels chasing them unless they are allowed to distribute their music in any way they want (including Torrent, free MP3 on their sites, etc).
What is optimal is a market that a producer and a consumer can both dictate what terms they want for a transaction. If an item has the chance to be infinitely available, the cost drops to zero. CDs can theoretically be nearly-infinitely available today. The cost should be close to zero. The time an artists can serve their fans is not infinitely zero (at least not in a live performance, face to face). This is where money can, and should, be made. That is optimal for all.
It's a model (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The author built a mathematical model of the world.
2. Then he performed (presumably) valid math within that model.
3. But generally, all models simplify, often over-simplify, the thing they describe.
4. So even if all his math is valid, his results may be inaccurate.
We also can't simply ignore the fact that the objective function he was trying to maximize embodies a particular notion of what "good" is. But we know that the idea of "good" varies from person to person, even amongst Slashdot'ers, in major ways. So just because we like the fact that he used math, and we like his advocacy of shorter copyright, we maybe should seriously disagree with his conclusion of "about 14 years" being optimal.
Re:Photography is an excellent example (Score:3, Insightful)
You moment of complete irrelevance (Score:4, Insightful)
Two completely facetious and irrelevant statements:
Wealth was generated for the companies involved in making, distributing, and showing the movies. Dismissing it as simply redistributed is silly. That's like complaining when someone says, "I made a chair," telling them, "No you didn't, you simply rearranged some wood, nails, and lacquer into the shape of a chair."
Technically, society would be just fine without all movies, books, music, and other forms of art, but it certainly wouldn't be better off. That's a baseless opinion that has absolutely no relevance at all. Unless you're arguing that copyright terms should be based on how good or bad a movie or other copyrighted work is, in which case, since the vast majority of the country happens to disagree with your assessment of these movies, I suppose the copyright for them should last pretty much indefinitely.
What was the point you were trying to make, anyway? I'm just curious.
Re:None of you understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
My own proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
Before I start, let me define the assumptions and problem, the way I see it. My problem isn't money. I'm perfectly OK with the creators receiving adequate compensation for their work. My problem is the fact that copyright is (intentionally or accidentally) used to bury some books or movies alive. Someone can buy the copyright to something just to stop more copies from being made, or in Disney's case to prevent some embarassing old cartoons from being seen. I'm sorry, but that was not the spirit of copyright law.
In other words, my purpose is to make sure that a work remains available to everyone, and doesn't effectively exit the culture. It shouldn't be possible to "unpublish" a work, and certainly not possible to use copyright law to that effect.
So my own idea of a "fair" proposal is to basically let everyone decide how long they want to keep selling it, for no more than the original price modified by inflation.
I'm not even putting any restrictions on the choice of medium, other than that it must be usable by the average person at the time. So a book could be on paper, or PDF, or scanned, or whatever they choose, as long as you can still buy it from the copyright holder. Music, well, it better not come on phonograph cylinders: digitize it to CD, or make an MP3 out of it, or whatever. Anything that a modern computer or home entertainment centre can play, really. Movies, ditto: if it only exists on some cinema reels, well, then it either should still be possible to buy cinema tickets to see it, or digitize it to MPEG/DVD/whatever. Etc.
Entirely reasonable restriction, I should think, since the purported purpose of copyright law is to encourage creating works for the use of the general public. If the general public can't use that work, then we're already outside that intended scope and effect.
But the keyword is: keep selling it. The moment something becomes unavailable for more than, say, 1 year, then it should immediately and irrevocably become public domain.
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it does [reference.com]:
Now, this is a different kettle of fish entirely:
What you're arguing in effect precludes any notion of objective truth, since every assertion is either an assumption or based on other things that are. And every person who argues anything at all has some personal biases. However this doesn't make his arguments empty or imply they must be biased by his personal preferences. This is a familiar position to me from arguing with my postmodernist friends. I'm not against postmodernism, Like Milton, I think any idea is healthy food for a strong and healthy mind. Yet I find that people exclusively educated in that style lack a certain respect for the value of data. And how we handle data is very important to whether we are being dispassionate or not.
This is one of the big problems with the modern media: it cannot distinguish balancing facts from balancing opinions. If they feature a evolutionary biologist, they "balance" that by presenting a creationist, as if their views were equally valid alternatives. In part this is driven by economics: weighing facts is much harder and slower than trotting out somebody who simply disagrees. We're talking about the difference between building something with legos and building them with raw stock and a machine shop.
The problem with strong emotions is that they narrow our ability to process information. In the grip of passions, we unconsciously filter out data which would alter our emotional state. When we're angry, we ignore data that would calm us and focus on data that makes us angrier. When we're fearful, we focus on data that scares us and disregard data that would make us feel safe.
So a dispassionate argument is not one that has no viewpoint; it is one that is impartial with the facts. It may discount certain facts and place greater significance on others, but it does so consciously with an identifiable justification. It is therefore negatable by negating its justifications and altering its selection of facts.
For that matter non-biased doesn't mean right either. It is quite possible to disagree with the conclusions of a dispassionate and unbiased argument, provided that you (a) have facts available to you that the person arguing does not or (b) disagree with explicit assumptions the person is working with.
Example: people who believe in intellectual property as a fundamental but alienable right (like most people consider the right to personal property) might well agree with every fact in this paper. But if they disagree with the assumption that copyright is about maximizing utility, the argument while valid, is wrong. It wouldn't matter if he showed that copyright terms of any age were automatically harmful to the public good because their assumptions is that the public good does not take precedence over individual property rights in any situation.
Now we all engage in wishful thinking, in which we can have our cake and eat it too. We can believe that rights are paramount, but that pursing individual rights always maximizes public utility. Or vice versa. But this is biased, passionate thinking. We have a powerful, unjustifiable and implicit axiom at work, which is that our preferred approach can give us everything we wish for. That is when we should be called out for bias.
Re:Good Stuff (Score:2, Insightful)
> ten minutes to read over a few of these papers and I'm pretty impressed.
> Not only is it well written but it aligns heavily with the Slashdot
> community's interests.
I started to read the thesis, and found that he reasons from a vast set of hypotheses, all of which can only support his conclusions, and had no attempt at real-world testing. I was frankly expecting that he would have the arguments badly rebutted with "But surely, Socrates, it cannot be that [insert strawman argument here]" like Plato did, but he didn't even bother with that.
For a start, he assumes that the value of a copyright decreases as it becomes cheaper to copy. By this theory, song writers should receive NO copyright on any song that is simple enough that sheet music is not NECESSARY to learn it, or at least not beyond the point that the first person hums it after having heard it. You may agree - this was certainly the situation before the early 20th century, when non-classical music was usually learned by imitating others, ala Professor Henry Hill's Think Method, and lots of songs were created during that period - but I expect that the proposition is at least arguable.
Frankly, I doubt that "Forever minus one day" copyrights make sense (except for some "music" where I would also raise the license fees to billions per performance, to drive them from human memory; I expect we all have our own selections here
BTW, I suppose that if we can prove that someone really COULD memorize a copyrighted book and teach it to someone else orally, as in Fahrenheit 451, that he could claim zero worth for book copyrights, as well.
> Also interesting is that he conjectures that the burden of proof of ownership
> in intellectual property should be placed on those attempting to acquire the
> IP, not anyone else.
Conjectures. This has already been disposed with by the concept of Intellectual Property. I could conjecture that the burden of proof of ownership in material property (say, pieces of coin or currency) should be placed on the victims of my cunning burglaries, as well, but I doubt that anyone, either the police or even Rufus Pollock (if his home or apartment was burgled), would agree.
> He has a paper detailing a model where innovation occurs without intellectual
> property in an attempt to show that the assumption regarding IP's relationship
> to innovation is false.
And Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin had models that proposed that same things, and generalized the argument to all types of property, as well. This is why Western Europe fell before the vast onslaught of consumer goods produced by the superior Soviet and Warsaw Pact economies.
Re:Often they do (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps this is true - the question which occurs to me is "how well does this chime with models from other economists?". If it was way out of wack with optimal predictions from other economists eminent in the field, then I'd say your supposition was right. If, on the other hand, the figures are of the same order (+/- 10 years) then I'd say your criticism isn't borne out by the facts, unless similar selection bias is evident in all economists considering copyright.
The papers that I've read on this subject (and Pollock's paper will take a bit of analysis on my part - not had time to do that yet) don't seem too far out of kilter. The consensus seems to be in the order of 7-40 years for copyright; which is way shorter than the life+{70,90} which most countries have in place. Some outriders have suggested getting rid of it, others that perpetual copyright is the only valid one. Those seem like extreme positions.
Certainly when the (UK Treasury commissioned) Gowers review concluded, (which, to be fair, concentrated on sound recordings, rather than copyright in general), the experts came up with the statement that the current 50 years should not be extended, and Gowers himself indicated that a good, evidence based, case could be made for reducing the copyright term.
So, in order to confirm or reject your hypothesis of predetermined result, I'd need to review both this paper and compare it with other papers in the subject. At first blush, I don't think your criticism is merited; but I concede I haven't looked at the paper in enough detail to say that definitively
--Ng
Re:Often they do (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with your criticisms, though not with your implication that he is massaging the numbers to get the results he wants. Regardless, I would like to point out something that, I think, is crucial about the approach he has taken: Because he expresses his logic and results in rigorous, mathematical form, it is possible for us to analyze and improve on them rationally.
Most debates in public policy are just rhetoric: trying to convince people by appeals to emotion and "common sense" (or contorted logic). There is no way to improve upon the debate other than to throw your own rhetoric into the mix. Here, we have a mathematical analysis. If you think there are flaws in the math, you can easily point them out. If you think he should have done an error analysis, you can do this error analysis. If you think graphing the range of possibilities is more fair, you can go ahead and do that. His work can be built upon, objectively criticized, and improved. This is less like rhetoric and now more like science.
So, far from being the "final word" on the optimal length on copyright, I view this as a step towards logical analysis (finally!). I hope that others pick upon on this work and come up with more reliable input numbers. That's how progress is made.
Yes, statistics can be contorted to "prove" alot of things. But the more rigorously and mathematically you frame your argument, the easier it is to point out mistakes and fallacies. I think this is a step in the right direction for this debate.
Having said all that, I will have to read it a few more times to determine whether I agree with the logic and math. However I think it would be premature to dismiss this without due consideration.
Re:Regulations don't make things "optimal" (Score:3, Insightful)
I hear this argument time and time again, but you don't realize that not all people feel the same way as you. I enjoy recordings and generally don't care for concerts. I would much rather sit down and listen, in the comfort of my own home, to someone who spent a week or two with a good technician to get their song to come out exactly like it sounds in their head rather than pay 3 times the cost to deal with transportation, parking, bad audio, overpriced beverages, second hand pot smoke, people vomiting on the floor next to me, just so I could hear an artist who is drunk, stoned, fighting with his drummer, etc.
To me, music is like literature. I'd much rather sit in my living room reading The Stand than pay money to have Stephen King read it to me.
The problem is how to distribute your music to people like myself, without getting bent over by the distributors. If you can figure out a way for a band to get their music into my home, while still guaranteeing the artist >50% of the profit, you'd be the savior of music. However, with digital audio being what it is, and with 95% of people having no moral objection to grabbing a song off of P2P instead of actually paying for it, that's a long, uphill climb.
If it isn't FOR the public benefit (Score:1, Insightful)
Look, art only has value because the public are willing to pay for it. That is all.
Now, copyrights are one method by which this payment can be assured. Not the only one.
However, copyrights are not only the method to ensure the public pays but also require the payment of the public to ensure it works (enfocement). Now if that isn't a small enough charge that everyone doesn't mind the charge, that's OK. But if it ISN'T to the benefit of the public, why doesn't the copyright owner pay for it? They can hire goons to protect their revenue stream and leave the police and courts for the important things that benefit the public instead. If it's done for MY benefit, then I will pay for the court time/police work/etc for copyright enforcement.
So you're wrong: if it isn't for the public benefit, then the private individuals should be paying for it. This isn't some sort of communist welfare state!
Re:So we need to plan for that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course. If IP holders want exclusivity they should pay a property tax. Based on a value assessed the same way the it's done on "real" property. Seems only fair. And they should have to deal with all the different rates applied in each locality the product is being protected. Just might make the game a bit more interesting. It doesn't seem right that I pay a tax on my house just for possessing it and these people are getting off scot free. Eh, the power of money. Must be nice.
Re:In the United States... (Score:3, Insightful)
Disney bribed Congress to alter the law multiple times, so Disney *is* the problem. The law is *also* the problem, but Disney is a large part of the cause of the bad law.
Re:So we need to plan for that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In the United States... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Proving once again... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proving once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect. A plurality system pushes politicians towards each other. If one party shifts right and is popular, the other party will shift right to catch up, which is what happens in the USA. Your Democrat party, in other countries, would be considered a fairly far right wing party.
Re:Regulations don't make things "optimal" (Score:3, Insightful)
I go to 3-4 shows a week, and I wear expensive form-fitting earplugs. I value my ears enough to wear them in my print shop [vipministry.com] and to wear them near an airport or subway/elevated line. I agree, the sound levels are ridiculous. But I do love live music, and I love finding bands to help out.
I really don't like the idea of devaluing a work just because it's easy to copy.
But that is how any market works. The laws of supply and demand are impossible to work around without government force and collusion, and I believe government makes it work. If an item has near infinite supply, no amount of demand will make that item command a price a little over cost, if not below cost.
The idea of buying presence may work for musicians, but it won't work for film makers and book authors, both require a lot of work and money to make, but once made, is easy to copy.
That's not true, necessarily. Any business you start has a huge level of risk to it -- it's called startup cost. With easy video distribution now available, you can create a few pilot-type episodes of a show, and Torrent or PeerCast the episodes for a loss. If enough people like what you're making (say, Firefly/Serenity), they pay for FUTURE episodes. This is how painters painted before copyright -- wealthy people would finance them. Today, fans can microfinance a production with more power than a few wealthy patrons of the arts. We're working on a small "TV" show that will be peercasted and torrented, utilized the directing and acting talents of 3 local Chicago theaters. Our estimated cost per episode, including sets, is less than $25,000 for a 44 minute show. $25,000 x 50,000 fans = $0.50 per fan. Bandwidth costs are relieved because of torrent/peercasting, and we believe we can break even with just simple Google Adsense and a paypal donation button. I believe we'll even profit enough to pay the cast and director and writers well more than minimum wage. Our cost to begin production is only $100,000, which we already raised from just 25 people we consulted with. If you can't raise $100,000 for an idea, it isn't a good idea. There is SO MUCH MONEY out there, even online, that there is no excuse not to move forward. Our episodes will NOT have a copyright, and we'll allow anyone to charge for distribution.
Under the suggested regime of no copyright, I just don't see how there's sufficient money to be made to make it worth making. I don't know if you'll recall, but a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon only made money in countries with decent copyright. It effectively made no money at all in homeland China because the movie was bootlegged immediately and it was basically only the bootlegs that sold.
It would have made fine money regardless of copyright -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had more ONLINE bootlegged copies in countries with copyright than in China -- the infrastructure for distribution in China is limited because of the State's ownership of so much. Bootlegging on DVD in a local community is the only form of distribution for much of China (I know, I've been there numerous times). It has little to do with copyight laws, it has a lot to do with the socialist ownership of physical distribution.
I've worked with 10 "local" bands that are now on national or international tours -- not one of them enforces their copyright notices. Not one of them has label support. All of them are eating, paying rent, and having fun on the side with the income from shows and merchandise alone. Two of the bands have active bootleg scenes for even their T-shirts, and they don't mind because the "real fans" laugh at those who buy the artificial merchandise. Big deal, the bands says, they can walk from a concert of just 200 people with $500-$1000 from the bar, and $500-$1000 profit from merch sales. $2000 for 4 guys investing 8 h
Re:Proving once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Patent periods... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which, by the way, is in line with the length of the lifetime granted to patents, an alternate form of intellectually property.
I have been saying for years that intellectual properties are similar enough that they should be treated equally. The lifetime of patents and copyrights should be equal. The extendability and transferability should also enjoy the same rules.
I am sick to death of seeing the technical works of scientists and engineers forced into the public domain only a decade after their invention while "artists" enjoy protection long after they're dead. The lifetime of a patent is often not sufficient to secure a profit for the inventor since often the invention is created long before its time. By the time other technologies have caught up to it so that it can be used effectively of cost-efficiently or before somebody has found the best purpose for the invention the patent has expired. Therefore the profit for the inventor is lost.
The only rationale I can see for the current system is that the technological properties are required for survival, or at least highly useful at improving quality of life, while the artistic properties typically improve the enjoyment of life. As a result the public mass demands, by vote, immediate access to the required intellectual properties and is less inclined to demand such access of the artistic items since they can live without them. That, or the artists/distributors are in the sweet spot where they make enough money to successfully fight for better protections while not presenting a product that the public unanimously demands and cannot survive with out, which would overwhelm any amount of money spent trying to legislate protection for it.
It's stupid the way science and its achievements are back-burnered and taken of advantage of in favor of artists, sports and celebrities.