this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Technology
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I’m not sure I buy this argument but I will admit that I’m not extremely familiar with the hoarding or sharing of trade secrets prior to patents. Any recommended reading on this topic? If your logic is correct, patents should be as short as practically possible to encourage information sharing.
I don’t see how this applies to copyright though. Are you concerned people will create works and then bury them? I don’t see the risk here.
On patents and lost knowledge:
https://ipwatchdog.com/2022/09/07/history-patents-can-teach-us-world-without-might-like/id=151264/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificio_de_Juanelo
Modern patents require the disclosure of information prior to being granted, so anyone can access the knowledge to build on it from the start. The patent owner's rights are enforced after the fact, by punishing anyone who tries to make money off the invention without a license from the owner. Their term is generally reasonable for mechanical inventions, with a maximum of 20 years, and the cost of maintaining the patent grows exponentially. Main problems are the term, and whether a patent should be granted at all, when applied to non-mechanical items, like software, medicines, organisms, etc. which don't follow the same pattern of investment vs. incentive.
Copyright, was initially intended to let publishers have some time to get their investment back, between printing, distributing, and selling copies of a book. Initially, in the 18th century, that was set to 28 years. However, instead of staying true to that intention and adapting to new forms of distribution, with the internet being the latest one, Disney lobbied like crazy to get to the current "until author's death + 70 years" term:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
That, is a complete mockery of the initial rationale. With digital distribution, Copyright should've shrunk to a fraction of the original 28 years, not grow even longer!
The concern is that people, particularly publishers paying an advance to an author, would not want to do that if they didn't have some assurance on the return of their investment. Nowadays, something like 1 or 2 years after publication, would be more than enough, even for films, which get most of their revenue during the first few weeks after release. Games follow a similar pattern, when they don't require an ongoing subscription.