{"id":19976,"date":"2013-04-24T11:59:04","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T16:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19976"},"modified":"2013-04-24T11:59:04","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T16:59:04","slug":"copyright-terms-are-almost-certainly-too-long-already","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/04\/24\/copyright-terms-are-almost-certainly-too-long-already\/","title":{"rendered":"Copyright terms are almost certainly too long already"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At <em>Techdirt<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techdirt.com\/articles\/20130423\/15252322813\/bureau-economic-analysis-shows-why-copyright-terms-should-be-greatly-diminished.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">Mike Masnick<\/a> makes the case for reducing the swollen length of time current copyrights are protected:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We&#8217;ve pointed a few times in the past to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techdirt.com\/articles\/20110207\/02222612989\/if-artists-dont-value-copyright-their-works-why-do-we-force-it-them.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">a chart<\/a> from William Patry&#8217;s book, looking at how frequently copyright was renewed at the 28 year mark back when copyright (a) required registration and (b) required a &#8220;renewal&#8221; at 28 years to keep it another 28 years. The data is somewhat amazing: <\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Copyright-renewal-rates-1958-59.png\" alt=\"Copyright renewal rates 1958-59\" width=\"492\" height=\"274\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-19977\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Copyright-renewal-rates-1958-59.png 492w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Copyright-renewal-rates-1958-59-150x83.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Copyright-renewal-rates-1958-59-480x267.png 480w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 492px) 100vw, 492px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As you can see, very few works are renewed after 28 years. Only movies, at 74% are over the 50% mark. Only 35% of music and only 7% of books tells quite a story. It makes it quite clear that even <em>the copyright holders<\/em> see almost no value in their copyrights after a short period of time. It appears that the Bureau of Economic Analysis is coming to the same conclusion from a different angle. As Matthew Yglesias notes, as part of its effort to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/moneybox\/2013\/04\/22\/depreciation_schedule_for_cultural_works.html\" target=\"_blank\">recalibrate how it calculates GDP<\/a>, the BEA is considering money spent on the creation of content an &#8220;investment&#8221; in a capital good, which needs to be depreciated over the time period in which it is valuable. Frankly, I&#8217;m not convinced this is the smartest way to account for money spent on the creation of content, but either way, the BEA&#8217;s analysis provides some insight into the standard &#8220;economic life&#8221; of various pieces of content, which match up with the chart above in many ways. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Techdirt, Mike Masnick makes the case for reducing the swollen length of time current copyrights are protected: We&#8217;ve pointed a few times in the past to a chart from William Patry&#8217;s book, looking at how frequently copyright was renewed at the 28 year mark back when copyright (a) required registration and (b) required a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,25,9,28],"tags":[135,122,200,290],"class_list":["post-19976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-economics","category-law","category-media","tag-copyright","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5cc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19978,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19976\/revisions\/19978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}