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.
Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.
How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?
I'm not a fan of Disney at all, just pointing out what i belive might be the flaw in the argument.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
Overall, IP seem to be a massive mistake.
Copyright terms longer than a reasonable 5 years are only benefitting Disney and the other big copyright cartels.
They are not serving the purpose of copyright: To encourage creation.
I think 25 or even 50 years is more defensible. But 100? Nah.
But the crushing problem today for many of us here is SOFTWARE PATENTS. These should never have been allowed in the first place; and until their scourge is abolished, everyone is at risk for having his work stolen with one.
I want a system that doesn't syphon money to the corporations over the individual creator and the corporations can't tell me I can't use the song.
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.
If you are truly a dumb pipe, that just transmits whatever the users post, then you shouldn't be liable for what goes over your wires. Like the phone company.
As soon as you start acting as an editor: amplifying some content and downplaying (or removing) other content, re-ordering it, ranking it, and so on, then you are placing your name on the content and in a sense should share liability around it.
Companies should have to deliberately decide who they are going to be: are they just wires like the phone company, or are they a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor department? They shouldn't be able to act like one, but have the liability of the other.
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.
This question is straightforward to answer with a single web search, so if you "always wonder" try looking.
In this case it's the creator, not the owner.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works and allowing people creative access to their own culture accomplishes that goal a whole lot better than protecting the profits of corporations for ~100 years.
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.
And, IMO, 10 years is in the ballpark for that to be true. That's ~5 major pieces of art as a minimum for a popular artist to have a career (assuming their 20s through 60s) [assuming each protected piece can sustain them for a decade].
Or, why protect it for 70 years? Why not 69 years? Why not 68 years? etc. Such a useless argument in every way.
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.
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.
Now stop being a clown.
Imagine giving the power to rightsholders to terminate anyone's internet service with e.g, a DMCA takedown. I'm sure that won't be abused at all, and is a very necessary step to protecting "artists"
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.
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...
[0] they were constantly sending CDs that were fucked-up in totally new ways every time
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.
In practice Megaupload is not an established company. Other consumer file storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud are trillion dollar companies with deep legal benches and lobbying muscle. YouTube seeded the service with pirated content and Google helped fight off a copyright lawsuit by finding evidence that one rights holder uploaded their own video and then claimed infringement.
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.
That said, I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that a customer should only be terminated as a last step and only after the ISP has been made aware that their customer is actually a repeat offender. Getting a large number of unproven accusations should not be enough.
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?
(Of course, we have "Evil Communist China" where there is no property tax, and people own their homes and can live there. Id argue they're more free than we are.)
But copyrights and patents and trademarks? There's no tax on those "properties". And gee, companies are the ones to likely own these properties, not individuals.
There is no reason why tax has to be done as property tax. Property tax demeans actual ownership of a place for us to live. (And why the hell do corporations get away with no tax on intellectual property, or even pay on profits, whereas we humans pay on revenue and property?)
Worse yet, property taxes also enshrine the idea that the community's schools in poor areas deserve poor education. Do children in poor areas deserve poor education? Cause that's how you end up with "great and slum schools".
And the police in my area? Its sheriffs. And meh. I dont want them to keep getting military playthings.
Street? That's what gas tax and EV tax is for. And those built in with gas tax funds per gallon, aka use tax. Or vehicle registration tax.
Fire fighters? We have volunteer fire fighters.
I'm seeing a whole lot of tax and tax and tax, and shit for return on this forced investment. And property tax HAS had people end up homeless. 1 family homeless due to property tax is 1 too many.
A 9-0 ruling written by Clarence Thomas which puts basic human rights (internet access) above civil liability - try asking a chatbot to find many of those.