The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.

No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.

So the people who made it should have been earning minimum wage, is that your point? Spread that dollar amount across five and half yeads and even modest team of people and their overhead, and they're making middle five figures after taxes. Is that a lot, to you?

It took five and a half years to make it. So, in perhaps over-simplified terms, that's ~$670k year working on it. Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how. But one supposes they also had some overhead. This wasn't done on their kids' laptops at night. There was music to compose, audio to record and design, and a lot more.

So, yeah. "Just" 3.7M is a fair characterization.

No, we just voted the tyrannical little statists out of office. And the people you're now laughably calling Fascists are busy exposing and tearing down the very tools that an actual Fascist government would (and did) use. Fascists don't cut off the cash supply to money-laundering NGOs that are making their pet politicians richer and more personally powerful. Fascists don't work to shut down the mechanisms by which the government can censor your social media use. Your case of projection is pretty impressive.

You know what Fascists do? They try to hide the money movement that keeps their circle of power functioning. Our little lefty statists are busy shrieking that the lead of the executive branch shouldn't be allowed to see the records showing where the executive branch has been writing checks. Gee, what would they be hiding? Their little circle of industrial-scale grift and waste and abuse is getting exposed, and they're furious about it. And here you are having their backs. Pretty ugly. Do you live off of dubious international grant kickbacks or something?

Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.

Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.

My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.

There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.

Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.

If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.

This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")

No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.

Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.

It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.

But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.

I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?

So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.

No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.

Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.

Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.

No, that's fine. Remember, it's not just Hollywood that does that; everyone can and does. For example, the Wicked movie just came out, which is the film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel which came out in 1995, which in turn was a derivative work based on the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 which has been in the public domain since 1956. (Although Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, did put in a few elements from the still-copyrighted 1939 film, but little enough as to not matter -- mainly just the Witch's green skin)

This is all exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage: authors -- and songwriters, and performers, and filmmakers -- creating new works derived from older works just as much as we encourage them to create new original works. The main thing is to get more works created, of any kind -- sheer quantity is the only way to get more works of quality.

Yes, Twitter was much better when someone in the Biden administration could write an email to a partisan activist working there and get people perma-banned for expressing doubt that Biden was handling things well. The good ol' days, right? Or are you just mad that now there are Community Notes calling the lying left out on the propaganda BS they used to choke Twitter with, and had Twitter staff available to ban anyone who called them out on it? Yeah, that must be frustrating for you.

Every single bit of shrill shriekery I hear that comes anywhere close to that on my X feed comes from the wanna-be tyrants on the left who crave the power to silence other people rather than counter things they don't want to hear with better thoughts of their own. Your own absurd ad hominem right here in this post is a great example of the craven screaming. I'm sure you liked that the Democrats - who called people deplorable garbage - used to be able to silence anyone who pointed out their duplicity and corruption.

Yes, when prominent Democrats talk out loud about sending people away for reprogramming, it's nice indeed to be able to speak out loud about it. Obviously, you'd prefer that people talking about that and sharing videos of people like Clinton saying it were silenced, just the way those prominent Democrats like it. Someone pointed out their creepy policy wishes? Cancel them! Just they way YOU'D like it, right?

Yes, when the Biden family rakes in millions of dollars from China and Russia and spreads it around the in-laws and the kids and dodges taxes on it while visibly selling federal policy actions, or the DNC launders millions of dollars in foreign money through Act Blue to try to buy Harris a presidency, or Nancy Pelosi becomes worth untold millions through blatant insider trading, it's nice to be able to talk about it instead of being silenced. I know, you'd prefer such conversations were silences, like in the good ol' days when Twitter had federal agents with offices in their HQ, ready to Orwell for you.

What are you talking about? Tens of thousands of deaths from fentanyl, crime, and human trafficking over the border deliberately opened wide by Biden's handlers? Untold thousands dead in wars that broke out only once his handlers signaled weakness and wars broke out on his watch? Yes, it's nice to be able to have open conversations about all of those lives lost, instead of such speech being muzzled by people like you, and those you obey.

What a ridiculous take on what he said. His point isn't that SpaceX faked anything, it's that China's quest for street cred in their scramble to catch up means making it look like they're hip, and honest, and open about their process (in, of course - it being China - the most controlled and dishonest way imaginable). Right up to and including faking R&D mishaps to show how hard they're working.

Anyone even remotely connected to contemporary image making can see that's obviously CGI. Looks like something straight out of DCS or the like. No chance that's real. Might be based on actual telemetry, but it's deep, deep down in the Uncanny Valley, and any reasonably worldly person can see that in an instant. Their motivation for showing the the challenges of developing such a program - including faking something like this to perhaps skew perceptions of how far along they actually are - are up for debate and academic. The footage is plainly fake.

I would suggest that the iTunes Music Store and music and video streaming services are why you don't see much of this any more. Not only was it a bad look, and expensive (Joe Sixpack pirates are not going to be able to pay much, however big the judgment is), and not effective at stopping piracy, but it turns out that the best way to reduce piracy is to provide inexpensive alternatives since piracy is largely the result of market conditions.

Anyway, no need to take my word for this; here's an actual circuit court opinion from the Napster case:

Wasn't trying to, but if it helps, the penalties are equal across the board. Downloaders, being individuals, may feel it worse than an infringing business with greater assets, but whatcha gonna do.

I vaguely recall that it has survived such challenges, though I'll let you research it instead of doing more work for you. I see no likelihood that statutory damages for copyright infringement will be held unconstitutional in any respect.

The only purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science by encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not have created and published, where those works are in the public domain as thoroughly as possible as rapidly as possible.

It would be nice if we could tailor it to each individual author down to the second and down to the bare minimum of rights, so that they are given the exact amount of incentive needed and not one iota more but that's impractical.

A year is plenty of time for many works -- a news article, for example, is only commercially relevant for somewhere between a day and a week, and the value of reprints or archival access isn't enough that it would not have been created and published if the term were short.

Anyway, I'm also not saying you only get one year. I'm saying you get a term of one year but can renew for another year, and another, etc. but in one-year increments. This is about as fine as we can reasonably chop up the time.

Authors -- presumably -- can be trusted to file their taxes every year, and to renew their car registration every year, and so forth. Annually filing a very simple form with a token payment (I'd be happy with $1; just not free) to renew a copyright is not burdensome. Especially if we're requiring registration as a strict formality.

The number of renewals might vary depending on the kind of work from zero (newspaper) to 15 or 20 (motion picture) based on how much incentive it tends to take for that sort of work to be created and published.

And if a copyright holder fails to renew timely when they could have the work enters the public domain all the sooner.

No. Remember, a "copy" is defined in 17 USC 101 as a material object, containing the intangible work. Much as the 3D printing folks would love to be able to download material objects, they just won't fit in an Ethernet cord, much less a WiFi signal.

When you download, you, the downloader, are fixing the work into your computer's storage device. That device -- usually a hard drive or SSD -- is the copy, and the downloader is the one responsible. (Leaving it on a RAM disk wouldn't help; then the RAM is the copy since it's not simply passing through briefly in that scenario)

This was all gone into fairly well back in the Napster era.

No. You need to take a look at 17 USC 501, which defines infringement as any violation of the copyright holder's exclusive rights. Copying is exactly as much an exclusive right under 17 USC 106 as distribution. But possession isn't actually one of those rights. A downloader is breaking the law by being the person responsible for downloading (no one forced them to do it, or took control of their computer and made it download stuff) which is the making of a copy. Mere possession of an unlawfully made copy is not infringing -- there is no exclusive right of possession. But as noted, since a copy is a tangible object, you'd have to find a disc or drive lying around on the ground -- you can't download things onto a medium yourself.

Criminal infringement is defined at 17 USC 506 -- it's basically just a matter of degree. If you infringe a lot in a brief period, now it's a crime. Or if it's done for commercial gain, or if it's a work not yet released to the public.

Nope. For the sorts of works people usually pirate, they've been registered timely relative to the infringement, and so now remedies available under 17 USC 504 include statutory damages, which do not require proof and which are $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, and can jump up to as high as $150,000 per work if the infringement was willful, which it almost always is. An 'innocent' infringement drops the minimum to $200 per work but it's rare that an infringer, even a downloader, can prove that they qualify for that.

Clever plaintiffs will only ask for the $750 minimum per work -- but for thousands and thousands of works -- to remove the determination of the amount of damages from jury consideration, but still squash the defendant. The Tatelbaum case back around 2010 or so was a good example as I recall. Also he had a crummy lawyer, but that's no excuse.

I feel like you haven't actually read the Copyright Act much less relevant case law. If you're going to make these claims about what is or isn't illegal and what the penalties are, you really should become familiar with it first. Don't make crap up, especially if you're understating the law which might result in people breaking it. Which is super easy for copyright which is a strict liability statute, and so your mens rea doesn't usually matter.