1 year is 1 year too long, but reducing to 14 years would at least be an improvement over the current effectively perpetual system..

I just don't understand this take. Why should authors not be able to reap the economic benefits from their work? Someone write a novel and everyone else should be able to copy it? It just doesn't make sense to me.

Why wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to physical property? Why can't I just go live in any house I want? Take any car I want?

Physical property is zero-sum. If someone else is driving your car, you can't drive it. If you copy my PDF, I still have my PDF and can use it exactly the same. I'm only deprived of a hypothetical profit I could have made by selling that PDF to you (if you would've paid for it).

Imagine I believe that depriving people of hypothetical profits is morally wrong. By the same logic, libraries are stealing from authors by depriving them of potential sales. Peaceful protesters are stealing from retail businesses by obstructing hypothetical sales. Municipal water suppliers are stealing from bottled water companies by depriving hypothetical sales.

My logic wouldn't have internal consistency with societal norms unless I accepted that creative production is somehow unique and special, and warrants special rules to protect hypothetical profits with the threat of lawyers and state-backed violence.

Still, let's assume I agree. There are many scenarios, illegal under intellectual property law, where the author/creator isn't deprived of anything, even a hypothetical profit. Consider that copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. For 70 years, the author isn't deprived of even hypothetical profit, because they're already dead.

Because unlike physical property, new knowledge gets absorbed into the culture and language over time, and you cannot hold everyone who expresses it to ransom perpetually. If that were the case, consider how much of today's HN home page could be read without paying royalties.

Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off.

There's a difference between perpetuality and "1 year is too long". A year may barely be enough time to get your IP to market. Meanwhile competitors will outproduce you, sit on it, and flood the market.

>Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off.

In my eyes, I pay to show demand to the creator to keep doing this thing. We can certainly argue if authors get enough of this, but I don't think rewarding skilled labor is a "novelty".

In my view, we don't reward labour, we reward its output. And unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty (i.e. it's not already available elsewhere). Happy to be corrected.

>Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.

Ideally, yes. In reality, far from it. Teaching and nursing are some of the easiest examples of how this structure is fundamentally broken.

>unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty

Well we don't take the time to measure the long term output of knowledge. That's a fundamental problem that goes against your view. If novelty is the value and we remove that, knowledge is no longer valuable and thus, not rewarded based on its output. Your novel research on the next iteration of AGI is no more valuable than some AI slop that spits out a recipe for a cake. And incorrectly at that.

Does that sound like a structure that can support a non-post scarcity society?

Not novelty otherwise random text would be valuable.

Ideally we simply give proper attribution and prestige to those sharing ideas. But if we could do that the copyright system wouldn't be needed.

Personally, I always threw around 28 + 28 in my head (given that life expectancy in the 18th century was vastly different), with a slight twist: only the original copyright author can renew the term, and the copyright ownership in this context needs to be some sufficiently small group inventors. Anything owned by a corporation larger than X people won't renew.

So any potential transferral or relinquishing of ownership needs to at the very least appease the creator(s) so these corporations can get their other 28 years of their terms.

Fanciful rubbish from people who have either never put in the effort to write a book, or are so rich they don't need money from them.

Only a tiny proportion of all books ever written have made a living for their authors. Most people write because they want to.