> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
Termination of Transfer is what happened to the Friday the 13th franchise. The screenwriter wound up owning the name Jason Voorhees, but not the adult visual of Jason. As I understand it, the F13 franchise owners could have made movies with adult Jason Voorhees as long as they don't call him Jason Voorhees. All in all it was a mess. I think it's all resolved now, but the situation did tank the online game that a lot of people enjoyed.
Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.
I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
He of course leaves out that the term was doubled in 1831, and that renewability became assignable at the turn of the 20th century almost 15 years before Disney was even founded.
Intellectual property rights are already different than other intangible personal property rights which are different than tangible personal property rights which are different than real property rights.
They're inherently different: creative work (especially in a digital, trivially replicated format) is non-rivalrous, and at least partially non-excludable. "You wouldn't download a car." [0]
Property rights are a social technology to balance incentives and peacefully negotiate scarce resources (including time and effort). It's helpful to think about them in reverse: that they encode legitimacy to use force (usually via the State) against anyone who violates the right. That doesn't make the force right or wrong, a priori; it simply describes what happens. Exactly when that force is legitimate is the question at hand.
"Intellectual Property" is a post-hoc neologism. What we actually have are three very specific institutions: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The last is arguably more like regulation than property: persistent brand identity to prevent fraud and confusion. Copyrights and patents are extremely clear in the Constitution, that their purpose is collective, moreso than an individual right for its own sake: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Hence why they expire: at some point, the incentive has already been provided, and the body politic benefits more by their being open-sourced.
Whatever "rights" framework one subscribes to, it is an extremely thorny question, whether they include the right to alienate those rights, to give them up on purpose. We allow people to alienate their labor, an hour at a time; but not to do so for a lifetime (voluntarily sell one's self into slavery). Many US states now refuse to defend "non-compete" clauses: that you cannot constrain your future self from working for a competitor for X years, even if you wanted to, even for very lucrative terms in the contract.
I'd argue that intellectual/creative works, are more like non-compete clauses: you actually create more bargaining power if you limit the scope, and take away the capacity to give up future bargaining power.
Your car (or other real/chattel property) is capital which can be used directly for gain (e.g., commuting to work, driven for hire), loaned, used as collateral in loans, have its likeness or image used, amongst other potential financially-beneficial actions, all without sale or transfer of title.
They're absolutely different. IP rights are a creating of artificial scarcity for what would otherwise be an infinitely-copyable work. Physical property rights are a codification of rights to a naturally scarce item.
IP rights require specific limitations on speech for everyone who is not the owner of an IP. It's walling off some expression as "copyrighted" so that no one other than the "owner" can express them (in a commercial way at least). Compare this to traditional property rights that merely prevent you from walking up to the owner and taking their (non copyable stuff) - a much lesser restriction.
This is why IP rights need to have limitations like a time limit, but I don't see why other limits like non-transferability are out of the question.
What? Car leasing is a massive market, and a large percentage of people and companies are very happy to pay to access cars and trucks without owning the title. Same goes for companies happily building on top of leasehold properties whenever it makes financial sense for them.
And as for IP, with the time limits, patents and copyrights are inherently defined to expire, but are definitely not worthless.
Valid argument. Car analogies usually break down at some point, and leasing is a definite weakness of that one.
But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos, if you want to restrict peoples' rights to buy and sell property of either a physical or intellectual nature.
Good point, but in this case I'm arguing for the exact opposite: I'm suggesting that (natural) people are the ones owning IP, and companies only lease it. I was just making the case that a lease is not "worthless".
>But at the same time, hopefully you won't complain about the encroaching "You will own nothing and be happy about it" corporate ethos
This has come about due to a strengthening of IP rights, and could be reduced with a weakening of those same rights back to where they were a few decades ago.
In the 80s and early 90s, companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega tried to use copyright and Trademark and patent and other IP based rights to legislate their consoles and keep people from interoperating with products and software they sold. The courts correctly found against them: That general consumer product rights, even in their minimal state in the US, gave consumers the right to buy products that could interact with their other products, and that companies that sold those products were not allowed to prevent it, generally following first sale doctrine.
You as a video game seller could literally violate Sega's trademark rights to make your game work on the sega consoles, as verified by a judge, that was "Fair use". If you could find a way to get by Nintendo's security chip, you could sell games for their consoles, and Nintendo could not stop you through lawfare. You could build an emulator of the sony console that you sell for cheaper than a playstation, and that was also fair game. You could reverse engineer the IBM PC bios in order to sell machines that could use the same software that was written for those PCs. All these things were litigated in court and affirmed by judges as "No, consumers have rights and companies should not be allowed to stop you from buying stuff from other people that works on their machine"
Companies didn't like this though, because having to compete with someone else selling stuff for your console meant you had to compete. So they got the DMCA, and now all they have to do is put a teeny bit of "copyright protection" code somewhere, and it is now a crime to interoperate with that system.
The reason computers stopped being so interoperable and stopped being so open and stopped cultivating a vibrant market like that is because you just can't do those things anymore. Microsoft can legally prevent you from writing software that interacts with systems in ways they do not want. You cannot sell non-Nintendo approved games on the Switch like you could on the SNES not only because cryptography and computer security improved, but because trying to get around that can now be a crime!
Imagine if physical product manufacturers had such insane laws benefitting them. Not only would your car need to take Ford branded gasoline, but any company trying to produce a gasoline that was compatible with Ford cars to compete with Ford branded gasoline would likely violate a bunch of laws and lose their shirts in court.
Ferrari can only enforce those terms by refusing to sell you any more cars, though. There's not much they can do beyond that.
GM also comes to mind, where they void the warranty if you flip your new Z06 or ZR1 within 6 months. It's nothing more or less than an encumbrance on the title, and they shouldn't be able to demand that without consideration in the form of a discount. But they can, because they have monopoly power in that particular niche.
Key point is that Ferrari and Corvette are niche markets. Car customers in general wouldn't put up with it, because there's plenty of competition for their business.
Tangent to your point, the Bible requires that home ownership work exactly like this. You can sell your family's home and lands, but every 50th year, the Jubilee year, the lands must be returned to your family.
The intent was to prevent permanent poverty (poverty = not owning land), and any slaves are also freed on the Jubilee (because slavery was also a poverty thing then). Today, though, it'd probably be more of a tool of a permanent ruling class, so it's probably a good thing that Jews and Christians mostly ignore that section.
Christians don't need to ignore it, it's part of the Old Covenant. Jesus said he fulfilled the requirements of the old covenant, the new one is very basic "love God, love your neighbour, don't sin".
It (Leviticus 25) was a tool of a ruling people-group; it kept Jews special and relegated other people's to potentially be slaves, and to not own property in Jewish lands. Also have special privileges to priests (Levites).
I mean that's part of why it's not relevant to Christians - per Galatians 3:28 - there's not supposed to be racial distinctions! And there are not supposed to be priests either.
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
In English this is usually translated as "moral rights"[1]. They are fairly widespread in other civil law jurisdictions than Germany too. Less so in common law jurisdictions.
But they exist to a (very) limited extent even in the US.
This is handled in the employment contract. The "Urheberrecht" is not transferable only inheritable, but you can grant "Nutzungsrechte" which means "rights of use". So in your contract you just grant your employer unrestricted and exclusive rights of use.
No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
> Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
Plenty of people lease. One way of looking at this is that Congress has kind of said you can only lease copyright (of certain types) and the maximum lease term is 35 years. Other jurisdictions have similar things with different names.
You could get different terms, but I'm sure you need clout first. Of course, the majority of my output is work for hire and I retain no rights and can't terminate it later; oh well.
> It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
The real cheat isn’t the 35-year wait, it’s work-made-for-hire and assignments of future unknown rights (VR, AI, metaverse, whatever - in 1995 for example it was the digital-performance right in sound recording)
Most business conducted in the world does not require someone to reject their lawful rights. For consumers in the EU, for example, the law even offers explicit protections by stating specifically that contract terms which are unfair have no legal binding.
It means “the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work”. If you’re having someone reject their rights in a contract because that benefits you, that’s a form of exploitation. You’re making someone worse explicitly so you benefit.
> It often just means "I don't like what I signed up for freely".
From my first post:
> If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
If you’re swindled, you’re not given them away freely.
Your posts read like “it’s too hard to precisely define these things so why bother” this is what case law is for. To precisely define in the context of real cases what the precise contours of the law are.
Clearly the EU has figured some of this out and might even have some of the specificity you are looking for.
This really reads like you’re playing rhetorical games. Do you legitimately not know what these terms mean or how they apply in the context of signing legal agreements? Are you unaware of their literal definitions?
If you don’t then my apologies, we can break them down for you and link dictionary definitions (or Wikipedia if that’s your preference).
If the statement is that any right that can be signed away can be swindled away, then I think something needs defining to make it a non-fatuous statement. I can sign away 4 years of my life to the military. Does that mean my life can be swindled away?
That's what we have courts and juries for. If a jury unanimously agrees that a typical person in a reasonable situation and with full understanding of the conditions would not be willing to sign such a contract because it would strongly go against their interest, then the person who did sign it has likely been swindled.
It is really not any harder to define than "freely". Presumably by "what I signed up for freely" you mean "what I signed up for without any coercion, threat of violence, etc". The people using "exploitation" here just mean that those conditions also include the implied threat of not having money to live. This is a real material condition which affects what people are prepared to agree to (even if they might be able to find a better offer by shopping around).
It is not hard to understand, and I suspect you are not trying to understand it.
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
Estimates suggest around 117–120 billion people have ever been born, while only about 8 billion are alive today, meaning roughly 93% of all humans are dead. So statistically, if you're alive today, there's a 7% chance that you'll live forever.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.