alt Hacker News> "Termination of Transfer" was introduced via the 1976 Copyright Act. It allows creators to unilaterally cancel the copyright licenses they have signed over to others, by waiting 35 years and then filing some paperwork with the US Copyright Office.
You have to wait half a lifetime?! Talk about a performative (pun unintended) law.
> when Congress gives creators new copyrights to bargain with, the Big Five (or Four, or Three, or Two, or One) just amend their standard, non-negotiable contract to require creators to sign those new rights over as a condition of doing business.
That’s the sign of a deeply broken system. It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
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> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
Yeah, I cannot quite believe the term on that thing. Somewhere between 10 and 20 feels far more reasonable since businesses do need time to work plan around and develop property.
I'm not sure how I feel about auto-reversion as a concept. I can see real problems with it conceptually (creating a deadzone around expiry etc)
The real cheat isn’t the 35-year wait, it’s work-made-for-hire and assignments of future unknown rights (VR, AI, metaverse, whatever - in 1995 for example it was the digital-performance right in sound recording)
> should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
So, if I sell you my house or car I can't sign away my rights on it? - Sure, there is a difference between material and intellectual property ...
Against swindling there needs to be protection from fraud, but that exists in most legislative systems.
> It should never be possible for someone to sign away their rights. If you can sign them away, you can be swindled of them.
What are you talking about? These aren't human rights we're talking about, it's copyright we're talking about.
Of course you should be able to sell your copyright to something. That's a major way you can make money, and a major way to get funding to create something in the first place. Every day you go to work and write code, you're selling your copyright to that code in exchange for your salary. You're saying you don't think that transaction should be legal...?
Yes you can be swindled. Guess what -- you can be swindled when selling a house or a car too, if you don't check the market rate and sell it for too little. Do your research, your due diligence, and if something looks like a swindle, then don't do it.
No. You don't need to wait half a lifetime. You only need to wait that long if you sign a contract and sell all of the rights. If you don't want to wait, just insist upon another time period. And it should be noted that the contracts only transfer ownership rights to a piece of property. It's like selling a car or a house. Would you buy a car with a legal backdoor that lets the builder take it back after a few years.
My guess is that you won't find any publishers interested. Why? Because developing a work requires quite an investment and only the hits make any profit. The backlist is what keeps everyone in business.
That's why it's called copyright. You can perfectly sign it away.
In Germany the right is called "Urheberrecht" which literally translates to "author's right". And while you can license your work and sign away the usage, you cannot by definition sign away the fact that you are the author of a work.
How is business supposed to be conducted under those conditions?
> You have to wait half a lifetime?!
I know you meant average age, but no one knows how long they’ll live. Even those given a death sentence by a doctors can survive or die at any time, just like the rest of us.
With regard to the article and as a former artist, the RIAA was scary to me, once I learned about it. It makes sense why even though most bands play covers, almost no one records their covers, and the thought of getting a lot of plays is a little scary.
(Note: Statistically, people don’t live forever.)
Termination of Transfer is what happened to the Friday the 13th franchise. The screenwriter wound up owning the name Jason Voorhees, but not the adult visual of Jason. As I understand it, the F13 franchise owners could have made movies with adult Jason Voorhees as long as they don't call him Jason Voorhees. All in all it was a mess. I think it's all resolved now, but the situation did tank the online game that a lot of people enjoyed.