What’s wild here is that when you talk about IP you are talking about entertainment and art and not lifesaving drugs and technologies on a global scale.

It’s a very privilidged western view of copyright and IP.

I recall reading somewhere that less than 5 years is the average time it takes for most individual works to earn the majority of its value, tapering off from there

So I’d probably do a 2-tier system:

Tier 1: independent civilians. After 5 years any normal civvie can take your work and use it without your permission to do whatever they want with it

Tier 2: Companies. Life of the author. For as long as the original creator is alive no company can ever use their work without permission

Fifteen years tops. Fifteen years is just under half of the average number of years you’ll be in the workforce and if you put your heart and soul into something amazing I feel like it enabling you to skate through at most half of your life is reasonable.

I think that over time, the term for new patents should shorten.

History is accelerating, and the larger the world is (as in higher population), the shorter patent term can be and still provide the incentive for invention.

I think that people who invent useful things should be rich, but that should be balanced against the world’s need for that invention.

So you get a brief monopoly on the production, and then later on others can produce that same thing without your permission (patent expires).

The patent term should be shorter in the 2100s than it is in the 1700s, because in the 2100s:

• There are more people, allowing the inventor to get rich faster by selling to a larger market
• The world changes faster

these are not totally serious thoughts, altho they reflect my kind of feelings about it

but IP should be periodically put to a vote, maybe a year or two after a major release, in which the public decides if they should retain ownership of the IP

if not? it’s released into public domain. obviously the original company / creator can still do something with it, but others can, as well. but if they do a good job keeping people happy with it, they can keep it

obviously this has some problems, mostly about constantly polling people and probably only dealing with IP that’s popular enough

but the idea gives me some deep satisfaction after seeing some companies ruin their IP, and i like the idea of consumers having some power to punish them for being shitty lol

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The original duration in the U.S. was 14 years, plus the option of a renewal for another 14. IMO we should move back to something close to that. One idea I’ve seen is that there’s an initial cost of however much for 7 years, and then the price doubles for every 7 year extension beyond that. Not even Disney can beat exponential growth, and it would force them to pick what they actually care about.

I’d also prefer explicit registration. We’re losing too many works because nobody’s sure who owns the copyright, and nobody knows if it’s safe to archive them.

I’d say that the original Star Wars trilogy should be public domain by now, for a concrete example. Disney can make new stories and characters in the universe and make money off of them, but everyone else should be able to as well.

Also as an aside, here’s Richard Stallman on why the term “intellectual property” shouldn’t be used. It’s an umbrella term that doesn’t really make sense, and more explicit terms like copyright or patents or trademark should be used.

Who does IP serve? It seems to me it serves very wealthy people who have the legal means to protect it. With that in mind, I think we should just get rid of it.

Granted it’s an honorability rather than abstinence thing, but why expire it?

Trademarks should be good as long as the company is in business.

Patents should be determined by weighing two factors: 1) how much sooner will the invention be produced than it would have been without the incentive of a patent, and how much will the public benefit from that earlier introduction; and 2) how much will the public be harmed by the monopoly resulting from the patent? The patent should then expire before the second factor outweighs the first.

Copyrights have been a scam since they were first introduced: the original intention (when printing was first introduced) was to police the printing of politically or morally objectionable works, but the authority appointed to do so abused the power to sell monopolies on printing specific works. Authors were originally opposed to this practice, and actually got it overturned for a time—the idea that copyrights are needed so publishers can compensate authors was a post-hoc justification publishers came up with to get authors to withdraw their objections. But it’s never been a good deal for the actual creators.

So copyright needs to be re-thought from the ground up—the amount of time that works remain under copyright is a secondary issue.

I’m in favor of abolishing IP altogether, along with all Private Property.

I support complete abolition of intellectual property as a whole.

Say you want to write closed captions for a movie, or even film a sign language interpretation of it, such that d/Deaf people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — even if you don’t post the movie itself, you’re still creating a derivative work and hence violating copyright.

Or say you want to record an audio description such that blind people can enjoy the movie better, among other reasons — again, even if you release only the AD track, this is still a derivative work and hence violates copyright. This obviously also goes for audiobooks.

Or say you even want to make a full-on dub of a movie into an endangered language, to try to break the reliance of its dwindling speakers on dominant-language content — in this case, unless you’ve secured a deal with the rightsholders such that you have access to the original SFX and music tracks, your only choices are VO dubbing like is common in the Former Soviet Union, or painstakingly redoing all the sound effects and music, before you can add the dialog. In any case, without a license, you’re still violating copyright even if you only release the dub track.

Now obviously the fact that these things violate IPR doesn’t stop people from making these things anyways, but IPR does still end up greatly limiting volunteer work in scope and visibility, and creates an antagonism between the rightsholders and those volunteering to make the content more accessible. So intellectual property in practice then ends up being among other things yet another mechanism through which the sighted oppress the blind, the hearing oppress the d/Deaf, the settlers oppress the Natives, et cetera. There is no universe in which accessible media and intellectual property coexist: as long as there is intellectual property there is a profit motive, and profit motives will never prioritize accessibility.

And this is not to get into a greater discussion of how private property in general oppresses the working class, although I should disclose that I support the abolition of all private property and not only intellectual property by itself.

I feel like there needs to be at least 2 separate sets of rules for copyright.

For independent artists, I think it’s pretty reasonable that copyright should last for their lifetime and maybe a little longer to make sure that their spouse, children, or other dependants can be cared for before the work goes public domain. We can quibble over exactly how long after death that should be, but that seems pretty fair to me (personally I’m tempted to say 18 years+9 months, so if hypothetically a male artist knocked up his wife immediately before kicking the bucket, that kid would still be able to receive something from their father’s works until they reached adulthood.) And if they don’t have any apparent next of kin, it just expires at death.

But when it’s not an independent artist, and it’s something like Disney, where that legal entity that owns the property could very well be around forever, I think it’s more appropriate to put a hard limit on it, maybe 50 years as long as they’re actively using the property- marketing it, selling merchandise, licensing it out, making it available on streaming, etc. and maybe 15 years if they aren’t doing anything with it (Again, we can quibble over the exact length of time, I picked 50 it’s a nice round number, and 15 because that’s how long a design patent lasts and it felt appropriate)

There’s of course going to be some interplay between those two categories, an independent artist who’s contracted to make something for Disney may retain some rights to that work, so what happens after 15 years? What if that artist is contracted to make something using IP that’s about to expire even sooner? What if an independent artist creates something insanely popular and builds a disney-like megacorporation around it with hundreds of other people all creating derivative works from that original thing, does the copyright stay with that original artist to expire when they die or does it become one of those corporate copyrights that expires in 50 years? And if the latter, does that happen automatically when the company hinsts a certain size or how would that happen?

I definitely don’t have all the answers to all those questions, but as a general framework that feels fair to me.