Here is what I don't understand: how come copyright gets expanded left and right but patent does not. Does Disney the entertainment industry have more power than the entirety of traditional industries which depend on patents to make a profit (pharmeceutical, manufacturing, electronics, etc.) combined?
I think it's a lot less clear what the societal benefits of forcing copyrights to expire are. For patents, it's much more clear -- a patent prevents others from copying the invention, so its expiration allows other to use that invention for economically interesting purposes, which have a net societal benefit. So on the one hand, the temporary monopoly allows the inventor to profit from their invention, and costs others their ability to exploit it, and after a certain amount of time, those needs are reversed.
For copyrights, in the purest form, what do you really get from letting it expire? The only really tangible benefit is to allow people to obtain the work without having to pay anyone, and (theoretically) make it easier to preserve and distribute orphaned works without the permission of the creator. It seems like as a lawmaker, it's really not that hard to rationalize saying "I can pass this legislation, extending copyright, or I can directly cause Disney to forfeit X million dollars in revenue".
At least with a patent expiration, you can counterweight that by saying "I can extend the patent, and Boeing continues to get X dollars, or I can allow the patent to expire, and other companies get to use that invention to make Y dollars." The tradeoff is a little clearer.
I would love to see better rules for copyrights moving to the public domain, not so much for the sake of Mickey Mouse, but rather for obscure and orphaned works, as well as simply decreasing the cost for the consumer to improve accessibility. But it's very easy in my mind to see why this is unlikely to happen.
That's an interesting point actually. Maybe there should be multiple stages to copyright expiry, where the opportunities to create derivative works open up over time, without the work itself entering the public domain just yet.
Derivative works are where most off the societal value lies. Something like videogame publishers owning any footage of their game being played is absurd.
> For copyrights, in the purest form, what do you really get from letting it expire? The only really tangible benefit is to allow people to obtain the work without having to pay anyone, and (theoretically) make it easier to preserve and distribute orphaned works without the permission of the creator.
Just as society gained from Disney's being allowed to use the stories and characters of Sleeping Beauty or The Little Mermaid, we would similarly gain from new artists being able to give us new takes on Disney stories and characters.
Or mashups - perhaps your Columbo novel could feature Mickey Mouse...
Let me tell you about it. There are three interleaved narratives.
One is about an elderly actor who played the TV role for so long that he's no longer sure if he's an actor or the actual detective. The second is about a real life police detective called Frank Columbo who is plagued by his identity with the fictional detective and who he resembles in almost every particular. The third is about the actual Columbo.
All three are simultaneously solving different murders, all of which have their exposition up front - in the classic Columbo style.
Just add an minimum annual tax for keeping a copyright. Currently holding copyright on older works has little or no cost once it starts costing money that would change.
It could be a dollar per year past it's copyright. That way there is little to no burden to the holder but lets lesser works free. Therefore abandoned works get released.
That seems like a great compromise. Pay a ten million dollar fee to extend your copyright by ten years. Most material becomes public domain, some exceptionally valuable properties remain privately held and generate value for the holder. Plus, we get some additional tax revenue.
In theory, one of the large tech companies affected by these laws could do it. I mean, Google's been affected by this in regards to everything from search to Youtube. If they wanted to, I'm sure they could spend far more than Disney on lobbying.
This feels like a fight that Silicon Valley companies should take on.
But the tech stack is much deeper than derivative works ever could be. Some derivate three generations down from Donald Duck is probably no longer a derivative of it, judged by current standards. But the computer I'm using right now could reasonably be covered by tens of thousands of patents all the way back to the origins of metallurgy, if those didn't expire.
It would probably be much harder to justify. IP law exists because it's considered a net good to society (everyone doesn't agree on this, but this is why we have it at least). Of course, it doesn't help that all the money goes into lobbying on behalf of IP holders who want to extend the reach of IP.
In theory, patents have good and bad side effects. The good effect of a patent is that it encourages people to spend lots of money on R&D because it gives them a period of time to recoup that investment once they bring something to market. The bad effect, obviously, is that this artificial monopoly can prevent other people from bringing similar things to market. But it's (again, in theory) a net good because the end result is that it creates an additional financial incentive to create new things, and once the patent expires then the negative aspect goes away. You are left with new stuff that may not have otherwise been brought into existence.
The goal of a patent system is to benefit the population as a whole, not patent holders, even though patent holders benefit from it as well. If it only benefitted patent holders, and didn't have this philosophical underpinning of benefitting everyone, we wouldn't have patent laws in the first place.
Copyright is similar in that it is designed with known pros and cons, but is legally rationalized as being a net good for society. The goal of copyright is to create an environment in which more stuff is created overall. The ultimate legal justification for copyright is the overall positive effect on society, it is not to benefit the copyright holder (that's just a happy side effect for them).
So it's a weird dynamic where both the patent system and copyright law exist to benefit society, but all of the money poured into changing it is going to come from IP holders who want to manipulate the law so that they can make more money than they are now. There are no lobbyists representing "all of society", unfortunately, so it's a very one-sided battle that only ends when judges and legislators push back on the IP holders.
To answer the question, I'm guessing that it's much easier to push for extending copyright because the societal cost to that is much less clear. It's easy to make an argument that (for example) pharmaceutical patents should not be extended because people will suffer. Cheaper drugs don't come until patents expire and competition is allowed to take its course.
On the other hand, it's harder to make a case for the harm done by extending the period of time in which (for example) only Disney can sell Mickey Mouse t-shirts, so it's a lot easier for the entertainment industry to lobby for longer copyright periods than it is for other industries to lobby for longer patent periods.
