<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>readbeard</author><text>In 1790, copyright term in the US was 14 years (if registered) plus 14 more years (if renewed), for a maximum total of 28 years. As of 1998, the copyright term is &lt;i&gt;95 years&lt;/i&gt; after publication (or 75 years after the author&amp;#x27;s death). So if creativity is equally as difficult now as it was in the past, I would ask why copyright terms have been so substantially expanded.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also worth pointing out that, since the vast majority of works generate almost all their profits within the first few years of publication, such a lengthy copyright term primarily benefits rights holders of the extremely elite set of works that remain popular after decades of publication. In practice, this mostly winds up being companies like Disney, Sony, Universal, and so on. Meanwhile, the group that is most directly harmed is not the public in general, but everyday artists—who are less free than they were in the past to build on previous works, remix them, or use them as supporting elements in a larger project.&lt;p&gt;Consider that, whereas consumers wanting to enjoy an older (let&amp;#x27;s say WWII-era) work usually face a choice between paying a small fee and getting an unauthorized copy somehow, creators face a choice between enduring a difficult and extremely costly licensing ordeal or opening themselves up to substantial legal risk. Creators often lose heart when faced with this dilemma—and many projects, at least a few of which would probably have been great, will never be made because of this.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ghufran_syed</author><text>Any reason to think being creative in general is somehow easier for people than before? Whatever solution you offer should also apply to the base case which is writing a story or a song, both of which are “cheap” in terms of required tools and yet extremely difficult for most people to do well. So maybe we don’t want to discourage the creators just yet?</text></item><item><author>willcipriano</author><text>It isn&amp;#x27;t 1900 anymore. With things with additive manufacturing and other innovations you can go from prototype to product faster than ever. A few year head start should be sufficient reward for most innovations. Perhaps you could handle the special cases (ie. somebody spends a billion dollars to invent a engine that runs on water) as one offs.&lt;p&gt;Same with movies, television shows and music. They just don&amp;#x27;t have the impact they used to. You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago. As it is faster and easier than ever to make a movie, we don&amp;#x27;t need to offer such a long period of time for exclusivity.</text></item><item><author>efitz</author><text>There is a very real cost to society to provide patent and copyright.  We have to have additional law enforcement, court, and prison capacity.  It’s not clear at all to me that society is getting its money worth in defending essentially rent seeking behavior from big business.  It’s also not clear that either patent or copyright in their current form actually “promote progress in the useful arts”.&lt;p&gt;I hate the terms “intellectual property” and “piracy” because patent and copyright are not much like property at all, and because actual piracy is a crime of violence and nothing like infringement.  And it’s not clear to me that the punishments inflicted are reasonable given the impact of the “crime”.&lt;p&gt;Given that, I believe that we would be better off without patent or copyright, or with only a very modest time period of a couple years.</text></item><item><author>if_by_whisky</author><text>I used to work for an expert witness who testified on valuations in IP infringement cases. I really lost faith in the way the US handles IP infringement in that job. I know patents are contentious in tech, but sometimes I think copyright is just as bad. I know it&amp;#x27;s not a popular opinion, but seeing how things actually play out really made me feel for defendants in those cases.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what you think of the effectiveness of IP protection, the way damages are calculated (and ultimately determined by courts) is just awful. I haven&amp;#x27;t looked at the specifics of that $65M calculation, but if the real number were closer to $650k I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised-- 2 orders of magnitude was a pretty typical spread between plaintiff and defendant expert witnesses&amp;#x27; valuations in the IP cases I worked on.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Nintendo&apos;s big piracy case is a sad story</title><url>https://kotaku.com/nintendo-piracy-case-bowser-xecuter-team-prison-pirate-1849026479</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>TheDong</author><text>Do you think open source code is worse off for the fact that copyright has been removed (via the various licenses, all of which reduce copyright&amp;#x27;s restrictions)?&lt;p&gt;In my mind, open source code has been an excellent experiment showing that eschewing copyright doesn&amp;#x27;t mean people are less creative. Certainly, I&amp;#x27;ve seen more creative open source code than I&amp;#x27;ve seen creative proprietary code.&lt;p&gt;Similarly, there are huge swathes of fanfiction out there which are incredible pieces of creative writing which are not charged for, are not created for commercial interest, and while technically copyrighted, the author may not even realize that.&lt;p&gt;There are masses of people producing tiktok videos and spotify music for an audience, with no explicit expectation of copyright protection.&lt;p&gt;People clearly want attribution, not control to the point where they can say that their work cannot be remixed into a new tiktok video (a common thing), or used as fuel for a new creative endeavor.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, copyright is largely used to stop such remixing, to prevent making creative derivative use of a work. If it were used just for &amp;quot;you must attribute me&amp;quot; (what open source licenses reduce it to), I would have no complaints.</text><parent_chain><item><author>ghufran_syed</author><text>Any reason to think being creative in general is somehow easier for people than before? Whatever solution you offer should also apply to the base case which is writing a story or a song, both of which are “cheap” in terms of required tools and yet extremely difficult for most people to do well. So maybe we don’t want to discourage the creators just yet?</text></item><item><author>willcipriano</author><text>It isn&amp;#x27;t 1900 anymore. With things with additive manufacturing and other innovations you can go from prototype to product faster than ever. A few year head start should be sufficient reward for most innovations. Perhaps you could handle the special cases (ie. somebody spends a billion dollars to invent a engine that runs on water) as one offs.&lt;p&gt;Same with movies, television shows and music. They just don&amp;#x27;t have the impact they used to. You can do special effects for a few grand that cost a million dollars a few decades ago. As it is faster and easier than ever to make a movie, we don&amp;#x27;t need to offer such a long period of time for exclusivity.</text></item><item><author>efitz</author><text>There is a very real cost to society to provide patent and copyright.  We have to have additional law enforcement, court, and prison capacity.  It’s not clear at all to me that society is getting its money worth in defending essentially rent seeking behavior from big business.  It’s also not clear that either patent or copyright in their current form actually “promote progress in the useful arts”.&lt;p&gt;I hate the terms “intellectual property” and “piracy” because patent and copyright are not much like property at all, and because actual piracy is a crime of violence and nothing like infringement.  And it’s not clear to me that the punishments inflicted are reasonable given the impact of the “crime”.&lt;p&gt;Given that, I believe that we would be better off without patent or copyright, or with only a very modest time period of a couple years.</text></item><item><author>if_by_whisky</author><text>I used to work for an expert witness who testified on valuations in IP infringement cases. I really lost faith in the way the US handles IP infringement in that job. I know patents are contentious in tech, but sometimes I think copyright is just as bad. I know it&amp;#x27;s not a popular opinion, but seeing how things actually play out really made me feel for defendants in those cases.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of what you think of the effectiveness of IP protection, the way damages are calculated (and ultimately determined by courts) is just awful. I haven&amp;#x27;t looked at the specifics of that $65M calculation, but if the real number were closer to $650k I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised-- 2 orders of magnitude was a pretty typical spread between plaintiff and defendant expert witnesses&amp;#x27; valuations in the IP cases I worked on.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Nintendo&apos;s big piracy case is a sad story</title><url>https://kotaku.com/nintendo-piracy-case-bowser-xecuter-team-prison-pirate-1849026479</url></story>