it sounds like we can't all agree, but frankly I also think the writing on the wall is that there won't be much out there that isn't paywalled, and much of that will have a bunch of ads.
Firstly, for the Americans, yours is not the only country and so while it is true that you made laws regarding copyright for a particular purpose it is not the same reason that copyright exists in much of the rest of the world, in most of the EU it exists because it is supposed that the creator has rights to what they made and that's it, whether it benefits society or not.
It has to be said basically every time one of these things comes up here.
The U.S is also connected via lots of treaties regarding copyright. Essentially to do any of the things that are always suggested about copyright in these threads you would need to violate all those treaties. Good news that Trump is President I guess, because there's a real shot.
While I agree that many of the problems of Copyright, especially from the American view, is its length, that is not all of them. The DMCA is not at fault for the length of copyright, and it is one of the main sources of copyright problems nowadays.
When discussing the solutions to lengths of copyright, which I've noticed here go down to as little as a couple of years, it's instructive to consider the cases of outliers such as Peter Beagle and the years he had to spend to get the rights to earn money on his book https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-sad-strange-legal-battle...
Obviously you can create a law to handle these situations, but the fact is he has spent much of his life not earning from that book. Someone will probably make the observation that outliers are not a good source for structuring laws but that's in cases for example where you are making laws regarding trade or similar things, and then the outliers have to lump it, but if you are making laws about rights you should consider the outliers.
Of course the American conception does not have copyright as a right, whereas the European conception does, so it is unlikely that if the U.S shortened the term of copyright that the EU would go along, and essentially everyone would have to still keep to the EU rules for anything they sold there. So if you wanted to make use of EU copyrighted material you would essentially not be able to make money in that market, meaning it isn't going to happen if you're in the business of making money.
Furthermore if you are a big moneymaking entity with copyrighted stuff and some of your stuff is in parts of the world with longer copyright terms than the U.S, then, depending on how your business is structured it might totally be possible to sue and get all the money made in the U.S for what the local courts consider copyright infringement, so if you're a big moneymaking entity you will not be doing any business with the stuff making use of things still in copyright in longer copyright terms of the world.
Normally when I read HN it is refreshingly non-parochial, and knowledgeable about the world, but when copyright comes up, it is not that.
Let us now go back to the DMCA and similar things that effect how copyright is policed as opposed to how long it is.
I think here Beagle is instructive, although I can also find other authors. One of the reasons for the creation of copyright is so that people do not get ripped off (that is to say in America, to foster innovation you allow people to profit from it, and make it so that it is criminal for various people to profit from your work). If they have copyright for all their lives if they get ripped off they can probably recoup their losses etc.
However as HN readership is generally aware, the ease with which one does DMCA takedowns etc. means that the people who have made something and own the copyright have a hard time getting their rights enforced against people who are taking advantage and screwing them over.
Personally I would expect if copyright were shortened to a really short period of time that, much as was the case before copyright even existed, people would run around creating fake versions of things and selling them, and people who control distribution channels would try to screw those who had the copyright out of any money for the few years in which they had to pay the money and then it would be a free for all.
Why do I expect this? Because there is already a lot of screwing of people over who make things, if you only had to worry about them for a couple of years think how easy it is to screw someone over and delay paying for a couple years and then having to pay is gone and you restructure some stuff and yippee you keep all the money!!
> for the Americans, yours is not the only country
Indeed! There are nations and cultures such as China and India, where copying the work of your hero or mentor is an act of homage and honor, whether or not you give them credit!
This thread shows so much evidence of ignorance. If people do not know what copyright is, or how it works, perhaps it is rash to agree with any changes to it. And, changes to copyright are a matter of international treaties and conventions, so the world is more likely to capitulate to Greta Thunberg's demands, than agree at the U.N. to "Abolish Copyright".
I think their delusion is probably in what they consider a small business. A lot of people on here, given their work experience, think of small as something with a few hundred employees.
Given that we're on HN I probably should've said startup, though depending on the business itself it's not unrealistic for some of those 200-400 employee companies to sit on a free Cloudflare plan if their entire website is static + a back-office CRUD app.
If you're building a tiktok competitor, that's definitely going to require an enterprise plan, even if you have only 4 employees.
> ... think of small as something with a few hundred ...
Yes, plus a strong bias toward IT-heavy businesses. Vs. if my company is doing commercial landscaping, or machining gears for automobile transmissions? Several hundred employees still gives me no reason to pay much for web hosting.
well first off, nobody asked for a constitutional right to clean water, what the court said was that not providing clean water did not violate rights to bodily integrity under due process.
Furthermore they said lying and saying the water was clean was fine because "there was no constitutional right to “truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”"
which is a stupid statement because everybody knows there is no such constitutional right, the question would be if not giving truthful information during a health crisis could violate some constitutional right.
I would have dug to see if they told somebody with money and power, hey don't drink that water because then that would violate equal protections (or at least that's what I would argue), but since nobody went there maybe it's not quite as sure a proposition as I would suppose.
I think this is correct. But the article is also correct (If a bit breathless and overstating on the risk): having to reinterpret neuralese is a layer of indirection which introduces effort and inaccuracy
How much time do the majority of people spend scrolling on their phones?
I tend to think that i don’t have time to do the things i want to do outside of work, but on the rare occasions when i managed to put my phone aside for a couple of weeks I find I have more time than i know what to do with.
Everyone’s situation is different obviously, but personally “I don’t have time” is completely untrue
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