Before people cheer too much, surprisingly works can retroactively be snatched back from the public domain and go back into copyrighted state.
The prime example is the movie Metropolis. It became public domain in 1953 but copyright was restored in 1996 only to re-enter the public domain a year ago today.
The United States is decidedly not going to extend copyright terms. The US only very reluctantly pulled works out of the public domain after it joined the Berne Convention in 1989. The reason ''Metropolis'' was in the public domain was because it failed to comply with renewal formalities, which are prohibited by Berne. Essentially, other countries threatened trade deals if the US made terms dependent on formalities for non-US works. So the law was changed and copyrights were restored.
As someone who works in the field (and who isn't a fan of the URAA), I can tell you that isn't going to happen again.
What's your read on what's going to happen with AI?
Will companies be allowed to train on copyrighted works? Seems like we'll fall behind international competition or supercharge monopolies if we don't allow it.
Japan and China permit training on copyrighted works. China goes a step further and allows AI outputs to be copyrighted.
Really interested in what insiders think or know about this.
Well, to be clear, I am mainly a public domain and copyright theory guy. I do keep up to date with everything here. But I also don't write laws; if I did, they would look different.
Companies are allowed to train on copyrighted works - or, to be more precise, there is no prohibition in copyright law on them doing so. On the other hand, there are no particular protections.
The real question is to what extent an AI generator can return its copyrighted training data as a non-de minimis output. In other words, can I get one of the existing copyrighted works by putting in a prompt? This is something that AI developers are trying to avoid, but it's actuallg a pretty tricky problem.
Allowing AI output to be copyrighted is one of the worst ideas in copyright. Thankfully, the US Constitution as interpreted by the courts only allows for copyright to inhere in works of human creativity.
By the way, while I'm very excited about certain "AI" things, I have a very poor opinion of the merit of generative AI — and I mean in theory we well as how it stands today.
What would your ideal copyright regime look like?
Mine would be different than what we have now, it'd be 20 years or artists lifetime, whichever is shorter - then 10 year long renewals are possible after that, but the cost of the renewal would ratchet up with each renewal.
I've also considered using a percentage of revenue for the work - basically a tax on the revenue from that work, as a condition for the right of monopoly on it - which would also ratchet upwards with each renewal.
I'd also consider a use it or lose it strategy for copyright like trademark, meaning if you are not making the work available for purchase/license within the copyright renewal period, for reasonable terms, you lose the ability to renew it.
Mine is mostly designed to deal with orphaned works, ensuring they enter public domain in a predictable way, I think the biggest issue with our existing copyright system isn't enriching Disney - they're still putting those works out there, making them available - its all the works being lost to the sands of time.
Disney regularly censors or modifies classic films in its catalog, and also simply pulls things out of production. If you want to read more, look up the Disney Vault strategy.
I'm well aware of Disney's business strategy. I don't care if they make their millions still.
I care much more about all the works that cannot find an audience because of uncertain copyright status, and not enough commercial demand to justify figuring out who 'owns' it.
I’m curious what you mean by this. If I’m not allowed under copyright law to make a personal copy of the latest Pixar movie or watch it without permission or payment, even if I’m not sharing it with anyone else, what under the law allows a company to make a copy and train on it? I thought I understood copyright law to not only prohibit redistribution of copyrighted works without permission, but also to prohibit consumption of copyrighted works without permission? Is that accurate? In that sense, I would have thought copyright law does prohibit companies from training on copyrighted works.
You’re hitting on the distinction between duplication and training.
I own hundreds of paperback books. Copyright law does not limit what I can learn from them.
It may be that assembling a corpus for training is illegal, but if so, that would be true even if it was never used for training. The act of training an AI is orthogonal to the collection of the corpus.
What does that mean, in more specific language?
If I create a poster in Photoshop, it is under copyright? What about if I use a smart fill plugin? What about if I use a prompt plugin?
“Find me a prompt to generate this image,” seems like an interesting problem to toss at an AI, I wonder if anyone knows of work in that direction?
Hypothetically if such a system existed where you passed in a copyright image, and then got a prompt to generate it, would that be sufficient to show some kind infringement?
The USA often ignores the international community in many things, if the right domestic interest groups are behind it. It's just that currently the USA has powerful domestic companies/interests that are against copyright term extensions, which are more powerful than the (also quite powerful) companies in favour of term extensions.
In the past decade, the USA also has tried to spread the new extended period over the world via trade treaties, of life plus 70 years, going beyond Berne's life plus 50 years.
What are the powerful domestic companies/interests who are against the copyright terms? I always viewed copyright extensions as being good for the masses but bad for corporations (the copyright holders)
I have a hard time to find cases when it's true in the context of media content.
Ignoring the international community is one thing, trade deals are another thing entirely. That's taken very seriously by all involved because it's about money.
Congress should have grown a spine and called their bluff rather than sell out the American public like that.
The American public also likes being able to buy imports.
You’re talking about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act aka the Mickey Mouse Protection Act?
Claiming that was due to foreign pressure was just scapegoating / misdirection from its supporters.
The US forced all sorts of copyright extensions on the international community back then (including DMCA-style DRM protections).
The support section of the Wikipedia page lists the main lobbyists for the bill. They are all US based, and Disney started lobbying for it in 1990 (the year after the US was brought into compliance with the Berne convention).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
I'd rather Congress adhere to the agreements they made.
I think the biggest Rubicon for Disney coming up will be losing Snow White in 2032, assuming no renewal.
Snow White the character was in the public domain long before disney made the movie.
Well they did extend terms in 1998 but I agree the retroactive part is unlikely as is another extension.
Uruguay Round Agreements Act?
This intrigues me as I had no idea, at one time, that the US didn't have the most restrictive copyright laws in the world. It looks like the US had to restore/extend copyrights to foreign works as part of the agreement that established the WTO?
That being said, copyright is a product of laws and laws can always change. Your comment made me believe that the copyright owner somehow extended their rights; not a literal act of Congress.
Read up on the history of Hollywood! It's deeply intertwined with the history of copyright.
Initially (19th century) the US did not recognise copyright of foreign works.
This is all about interests: when you are a net importer you want to make it easy and cheap to reproduce and use works. Buy once you start being an exporter you want your works protected, and that's a quid pro quo.
What happens is that lobbyists for the same (copyright) interest groups instructs their governments that extended copyright is in their interest, and that whoever have the longest should “win” and become the norm.
WTOs are basically big business “negotiating” with itself through nation states.
The copyright owners persuaded other countries to make copyright very long, then persuaded the USA to fall in line with other countries.
Just curious...why would anyone here cheer? Have HNers been desperate to launch their own Mickey Mouse novelty tee Etsy stores for years?
It's not about Mickey specifically, but rather about what it represents.
The entry of new works into the commons was shut down for a long time, with Disney keeping Mickey under copyright being viewed as the main driver for the lobbying that's kept it closed. We're coming off of two sequential 20-year extensions, and got our first works entering the public domain in the US in 2019, at which point there was a clear deadline for Disney to either get copyright extended again or cede the point.
So Mickey starting to creep into the public domain means the commons probably won't be closed again, since nobody else has as much interest in pushing that as Disney did.
I'd be interested in hearing why that isn't tortious interference, or did the government pay out a bunch of money when it became copywritten again?