A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.
I agree with you that 10 years is more than enough time for corporations to turn a healthy profit on something (not that they can't continue to make money off of works after something has entered the public domain), but this wasn't a small victory.
If every ISP were at risk of being on the hook for endless billions in damages because of what their users did it would mean that ISPs would be forced to give in to the RIAA/MPAs demands to permanently terminate the accounts of internet users over completely unproven (and often inaccurate) accusations of piracy. It's worth noting that cox was actually already doing this in a limited number of circumstances, and the media industry still wasn't satisfied.
The media industry insisted that they needed the power to get people's accounts terminated even though it would have left many people, including fully innocent ones, cut off from the internet entirely. This was a big deal and I'm honestly surprised to see this supreme court do the right thing.
I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be around $70.5k renewal. At 50 years it'd be $50 million. At 75 years it'd be $35 billion. Fixed amount and exponential can of course be shifted around here but the idea would be to encourage creators to use works hard and if they couldn't make it work not sit on them but release them. Once in awhile something would be such a big hit it'd be worth keeping a long time, and that's ok, but society gets its due too. And most works would be allowed to lapse as they stopped being worth it.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
How about something like IP as a tax? IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
I want to be super clear that I'm not proposing some finalized plan or numbers here, it'd need some real work spent hashing it all out. Mainly though I hope people will consider more the huge space of untapped approaches to balancing various benefits and costs towards a better societal outcome. And that maybe that helps a little in getting us out of some of the present seemingly intractable boxes we so often seem stuck in?
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.
That's how you end up with "Hollywood accounting" where movies that gross over 100M dollars still show as a "loss" for tax purposes via creative accounting methods.
At this stage I just want a coherent system. There is no way "individuals can have their accounts terminated for one song" and "AI companies can download a complete copy of everything, including pirated works, and roll it into models which can reproduce it exactly and sell it back to you" should be able to co-exist.
The reason copyright doesn't get fixed or removed is largely because the general public is worried more about other things and the big rightsholders continue their monthly payments—err, lobbying.
Though AI might change that. In the end, large corporations get what they want.
The general public also get sold on the rosy idea that copyright (and patents to a certain extent), protect the little guy, that thanks to this mechanism their work will not be stolen by opportunistic freeloaders. It also resonates with the "one day I will strike rich" mentality.
What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.
The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.
What is "financially viable"? Just hoarding copyrighted materials and not distributing them in order to create artificial scarcity could meet that criteria.
Whoever drafts the law has to arbitrarily choose a number, or there will be no end of litigation to settle it, and a judge will arbitrarily choose a number. OP's opinion is "not more than 10" so 9, 8 and 1 would all be fine with them, while 11 would be too long. Source: reading. Meanwhile you haven't even made clear where you stand on the issue or what point you're making or in what way "differently" OP is supposed to feel.
Copyright is an artificial monopoly set in place to guarantee that artists get a piece of the cake from distributors. The duration of this monopoly is completely arbitrary, and ideally it should be "long enough to make art creation a viable trade".
I think I've made plenty and I don't feel differently.
You could ask the same questions about the actual duration of copyrights as they are today. You present those rhetorical questions as if they were some argument against this proposal, but they're just things you need to think about regardless of what scheme you come up with: why this, and why not something else? It's not like "life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from creation" is any less arbitrary.
We should remember that the purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is explicitly, per the US Constitution, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...." The purpose is not to ensure that creators can keep collecting money decades after they created their works. It may be useful to ensure that as a way to promote progress, but it's just a tool, not the goal. If progress is better promoted with a 10-minute copyright term then we should do that instead.
I'd expect most people in this forum have made something "worth protecting" or even make a living doing so. Certainly it's been my career. I still think we should drastically shorten copyrights and expect more to grant it. e.g. for software, require source escrow to the copyright office and probably require source availability to purchasers, and ban things like hardware that only runs signed software. Basically the law should be GPL without redistribution, but where you could hire a programmer to fix things for you and maybe share your diff. Or just straight GPL (i.e. software should not be eligible for copyright as it's a functional thing, not a creative thing, and consumer protection law should make it mandatory to provide source and a way to load your own version for any device that has it). For other works, registration fees should cover storage of a master copy until expiration + N years so it can be released to the public. Maybe "source material" there as well wherever it makes sense. I understand that might make my career less lucrative. That's fine.
The bondage of intellectual property forces very particular branches of human development to the exclusion of others. It's no surprise that restriction of thought and creativity - and most of all, music - is to be found alongside war and predation and uninspired leadership.
IANAL but it seems to have major implications beyond music piracy, like into the realm of ISPs and free speech in general, it seems the court (rightly) sees ISPs as a common carrier (like water pipes) and we may see more opinions of the kind that reach into the space of monopolies or duopolies in social media next.
Big tech should loose its safe harbor protection. It’s both an aggregator AND a curator. The algorithms showing you what to see is no different than a newspaper editor. Just like newspapers big tech should be liable for their “feeds” showing harmful and defamatory information
I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
I would be happy if congress passed a law saying a social media has no liability for anything their users post as long as the algorithm is completely open source. If we had social media like that, they'd even have APIs that let users design their own algorithm and we'd see a golden age of social media emerge from it. Twitter seems to moving in this direction but they enjoy no legal protections from being open at the moment. Blusky is already this way I believe, but without a neutral and trusted centralized control it's a bit different of an animal.
9-0 against the record labels. This effectively ends a long running strategy of trying to milk ISPs for people torrenting without a VPN. At the same time it likely puts things like the *Arr stack at more risk given their more tailored nature.
I still haven't bought a Sony labelled product since... though I may or may not have consumed Sony content. They've definitely lost more than they gained.
That's a pretty good sized ego you got yourself there. The number of people that cared about the rootkit in the general populace was insignificant to Sony. Only tech nerds like us even knew about the rootkit or how insane it was to use. Unless you were a huge flagship purchaser of Sony's latest/greatest each year, they don't even notice you when you buy a TV or any other item.
People barely remember the studio getting hacked and releasing a film
The media industry has already decided that it should be allowed to turn copyright enforcement into a revenue stream and I doubt they're going to stop their extortion racket now.
This ruling could mean that they'll increase their efforts targeting individuals with threatening letters demanding that they admit wrongdoing and settle for a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars at a time or else get sued in court and be forced to pay a lawyer tens of thousands to defend their innocence. It could mean they actually take more individuals to court instead of dropping the case every time they threaten somebody with enough money to hire a lawyer to defend them at trial.
The media industry is also pushing for more control in other ways as well like blank media style taxes which would let them rake in a steady stream of cash without needing to make make specific accusations. They also still want to be able to force ISPs to instantly blacklist any IPs they accuse of streaming copyrighted content. They've got this power in many countries already and innocent users have already been screwed over by it. They may decide to focus their efforts on getting this pushed through in the US now.
I doubt this ruling will lead to the kinds of broad copyright reforms we need, but it's long past time the courts started pushing back on the insane power grabs of the RIAA/MPA. No other industry could get away with demanding what they have.
I had several roommates, and we each were responsible for a utility. I was responsible for internet, and Cox was our provider.
I received multiple e-mails from Cox about copyright infringement. I can't recall them, but I remember it being serious enough for me to tell people to stop.
Thinking back, I feel like Cox's position is right and fair; let users know they're being observed by copyright holders, and inform the user that they could be compelled to provide their identity to complainants.
But ultimately, the responsibility to "stop" the supposed infringement is on the holder, not Cox.
> They said that Cox had ignored bad actors, helping 60,000 users distribute more than 10,000 copyrighted songs for free
This is such a tiny number for a company which provides internet to over 6 million homes. I was expecting it to be in millions or at least hundreds of thousands.
So... does that mean we don't have to care about takedown notices anymore?
Like, the only reason to comply with such an onerous and censorious takedown regime was specifically to disclaim contributory copyright liability that SCOTUS just unanimously decided to erase. Is it such that as long as people aren't stupid and don't market their services as an infringement facilitator, which most don't, that they don't have to honor 512 takedown notices now? Conversely, services dumb enough to actually market themselves as infringement tools probably can't get rid of their liability by the 512 safe harbor. So there's no reason to actually honor a DMCA takedown request anymore.
This was what GFiber appeared to be doing until it sold out to private equity. I got about 60 DMCA notice emails about torrents that never reached seeding state. About 25% of them were false accusations with wrong titles unrelated to activity by anyone on my network.
It’s interesting to see how as soon as intellectual property theft starts to be critical for powerful interests the legal system magically gets more lenient about copyright enforcement.
The balance between public good and protecting IP ownership of the creatives (which is, paradoxically, also part of the public good) has to be struck and enforced consistently.
They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited.
The authors case was thrown out on narrow reasoning. But companies now live by different rules so I suspect they won’t be held to account. Even Disney/nintendo are unlikely to stop this…
Anthropic ($1.5B+ Settlement): In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit over using roughly 500,000 copyrighted books from "shadow libraries" to train their Claude LLMs.
If every ISP were at risk of being on the hook for endless billions in damages because of what their users did it would mean that ISPs would be forced to give in to the RIAA/MPAs demands to permanently terminate the accounts of internet users over completely unproven (and often inaccurate) accusations of piracy. It's worth noting that cox was actually already doing this in a limited number of circumstances, and the media industry still wasn't satisfied.
The media industry insisted that they needed the power to get people's accounts terminated even though it would have left many people, including fully innocent ones, cut off from the internet entirely. This was a big deal and I'm honestly surprised to see this supreme court do the right thing.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
Free then make it cost more. A lot could enter the public domain, and valuable IP could be kept by companies as long as they’re willing to pay.
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.
Though AI might change that. In the end, large corporations get what they want.
What they usually "forget" to tell you is that your IP is absolutely worthless if you don't have the resources to defend it in court, which in turns actually advantages freeloaders who either have relatively low costs to sue (patent trolls are basically an example of this) or enough money that they don't feel the pain if they lose.
The current system basically incentivizes suing over IP NOT creating it.
If you made anything that was worth protecting you might feel differently.
While 10 is arbitrary, I like it because it is much closer to balancing incentive for creativity vs stifling creativity.
I make software and data. It’s worth protecting. But I think the harm from copyright protection has been greater than the benefit.
Framing it as people who want reasonable copyright as anti-creator is so not cool and avoids discussion.
I always wonder when copyright runs out for artist who sold their collections to companies.
Or, why protect it for 70 years? Why not 69 years? Why not 68 years? etc. Such a useless argument in every way.
How do you know they didn't? Oh, because of the No True Scotsman of "no person who truly made something worth protecting can have this opinion".
As if none of us have released anything under an MIT license. Ridiculous.
Please don't put those of us who create so-called 'intellectual property' for a living in the middle of this.
We didn't ask for government protection and we don't want it.
https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8
You could ask the same questions about the actual duration of copyrights as they are today. You present those rhetorical questions as if they were some argument against this proposal, but they're just things you need to think about regardless of what scheme you come up with: why this, and why not something else? It's not like "life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from creation" is any less arbitrary.
We should remember that the purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is explicitly, per the US Constitution, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...." The purpose is not to ensure that creators can keep collecting money decades after they created their works. It may be useful to ensure that as a way to promote progress, but it's just a tool, not the goal. If progress is better promoted with a 10-minute copyright term then we should do that instead.
Now stop being a clown.
I'm not so sure they're unrelated.
The bondage of intellectual property forces very particular branches of human development to the exclusion of others. It's no surprise that restriction of thought and creativity - and most of all, music - is to be found alongside war and predation and uninspired leadership.
Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.
Love to see it. I'm still mad about the Sony rootkit[0] and the people sued for absurd amounts over downloading a few MP3s back in the 00's.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
That's a pretty good sized ego you got yourself there. The number of people that cared about the rootkit in the general populace was insignificant to Sony. Only tech nerds like us even knew about the rootkit or how insane it was to use. Unless you were a huge flagship purchaser of Sony's latest/greatest each year, they don't even notice you when you buy a TV or any other item.
People barely remember the studio getting hacked and releasing a film
Maybe, just maybe assume the best in people instead of jumping to the worst interpretations you can.
This ruling could mean that they'll increase their efforts targeting individuals with threatening letters demanding that they admit wrongdoing and settle for a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars at a time or else get sued in court and be forced to pay a lawyer tens of thousands to defend their innocence. It could mean they actually take more individuals to court instead of dropping the case every time they threaten somebody with enough money to hire a lawyer to defend them at trial.
The media industry is also pushing for more control in other ways as well like blank media style taxes which would let them rake in a steady stream of cash without needing to make make specific accusations. They also still want to be able to force ISPs to instantly blacklist any IPs they accuse of streaming copyrighted content. They've got this power in many countries already and innocent users have already been screwed over by it. They may decide to focus their efforts on getting this pushed through in the US now.
I doubt this ruling will lead to the kinds of broad copyright reforms we need, but it's long past time the courts started pushing back on the insane power grabs of the RIAA/MPA. No other industry could get away with demanding what they have.
I had several roommates, and we each were responsible for a utility. I was responsible for internet, and Cox was our provider.
I received multiple e-mails from Cox about copyright infringement. I can't recall them, but I remember it being serious enough for me to tell people to stop.
Thinking back, I feel like Cox's position is right and fair; let users know they're being observed by copyright holders, and inform the user that they could be compelled to provide their identity to complainants.
But ultimately, the responsibility to "stop" the supposed infringement is on the holder, not Cox.
Well, those would be in the same position now that they previously were I think.
This is such a tiny number for a company which provides internet to over 6 million homes. I was expecting it to be in millions or at least hundreds of thousands.
Like, the only reason to comply with such an onerous and censorious takedown regime was specifically to disclaim contributory copyright liability that SCOTUS just unanimously decided to erase. Is it such that as long as people aren't stupid and don't market their services as an infringement facilitator, which most don't, that they don't have to honor 512 takedown notices now? Conversely, services dumb enough to actually market themselves as infringement tools probably can't get rid of their liability by the 512 safe harbor. So there's no reason to actually honor a DMCA takedown request anymore.
But if you’re a pure ISP and not hosting content on your own servers, then I guess, yeah DMCA doesn’t really apply to you?
The balance between public good and protecting IP ownership of the creatives (which is, paradoxically, also part of the public good) has to be struck and enforced consistently.
I don’t think this case or anything else has been affected by AI training on copyrighted material, if it is deemed infringing.
They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited.
The authors case was thrown out on narrow reasoning. But companies now live by different rules so I suspect they won’t be held to account. Even Disney/nintendo are unlikely to stop this…
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/judge-tosses-authors-ai-tr...
Anthropic ($1.5B+ Settlement): In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit over using roughly 500,000 copyrighted books from "shadow libraries" to train their Claude LLMs.