This article assumes that there is a person with dedicated time to validate the data. Imagine you want this data and ask for it, but the government says, “sorry, we have this data, but we read an article that said we can only publish it if we spend a lot of time validating it. This data changes frequently and we don’t have a chunk of a full-time data analyst’s salary to spend on it, so we just aren’t going to publish anything. We’d rather put out nothing than embarrass ourselves, so you can’t even try to validate it yourself.”
In fact, the government agencies will argue that they have zero legal obligation to clean the data, let alone figure anything about the data, and that they're just giving you the data as-is. This happened to me on a FOIA call where I was trying to get data from the county state's attorney. They insisted they could only run a specific report and that they had no obligation to run any query, meaning I can't even get access to the data I need.
My favorite example of this is Joy Division. They’re the band with that cool white-on-black ridge line plot shirt. If you haven’t listened to their music before, go check it out. You probably won’t like it very much. I don’t know how many records or shirts they sold, but their ratio of shirts sold to records sold has to be one of the wildest.
The bulk of those shirts have got to be pirated, but for a while they were selling them at Bandy Melville, a clothing store whose target demographic has seemingly very little overlap with fans of Joy Division. The ultimate triumph of the signifier over the signified.
Well, it was a public domain picture of pulsar, and I remember seeing it in Scientific American before the band used it. I had the shirt, loved it. Had tix to see them on their first tour of the states and then Ian had to go and off himself.
That's a band I have seen mentioned here on HN quite a bit, but I have never heard of anywhere else. I proably do know a couple of their songs but just in a way that I would say "I've heard that before" not that I would be able to say "oh that's Joy Division."
This is a fantastic example - the Harry Potter movies have already been wildly profitable, surely enough to have solidly incentivized their creation. And they are now firmly part of our collective cultural background, to the point that most of the value comes from the network effects of people who have watched them rather than the works themselves.
The first book was written in 1997, and released as a movie in 2001. The last book was written in 2007, and released as a movie in 2011.
Putting a 20-year limit on the copyright would mean that one could use the characters/story (from the book) starting in 2017 - either riffing on them or perhaps even a complete remake. And this would still be 6 years after the final movie was released. The movies themselves would of course each have their own 20 year periods of monetization. You could legally watch the whole series of movies on a personal computer starting in 2031, which is still 5 years away. This all seems eminently reasonable to me.
Yes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to be published, with the author of those works knowing that they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been incentivized.
If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?
But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.
> If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?
That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then a game development studio made a series of wildly successfully videogames based on his work, which definitely made way more money than his books, to the point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I struggle to imagine how it could be just that the videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him nothing.
You just nailed the difficult balance in copyright law. I agree that life+70 is wayyyyy too long. But you also want to incentivize creators to keep trying to make something of their existing IP. Sapkowski is one example. Another good one is the Dresden Files series, which is 26 books in and still going strong. Each book in the series repeats some of the basics that were covered in the original (often using the exact same phrasing). Then the author extends the story over the course of a few hundred pages. If the original book were already public domain, anybody could write a fairly convincing in-universe book and I have to imagine the author would have moved on to other series.
Personally, I think 50 years strikes the best balance. Everything from the '60s would be fair use, so Spiderman would be public domain but not a wizard named Harry.
He sold his rights to CDPro. Also the videogame made him famous- I for one read one of his books BECAUSE of the game and I'm sure that I am not the only one.
There's a reason why writers want their books to become videogames and or movies.
I would not be surprised if the Tolkien estate made more money after the Peter Jackson movie came out than in all the decades before...
And most importantly artists are not children. If they don't have business sense enough to read a contract they should hire an agent.
>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.
In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.
AI is good at coding because it is heavily text focused with excellent documentation and a relatively clear binary on works/doesn’t work. I wouldn’t so quickly lump all other kinds of remote work into the same bucket based on your experience coding.
Lots of Olympic events seem well suited to the format. BMX racing, freestyle skiing, luge/skeleton, and a variety of track and field events all have runs that last for less than a couple of minutes. Not sure if there’s anything comparable in the realm of professional sports besides highlights
I remember that Turkish guy and the Korean woman who looked like total badasses in the shooting competition in the Olympics, the Turkish guy because he wasn’t using all the fancy gear, and the woman because she looked like someone out of a James Bond movie. Those highlights were just too cool.
That's actually an interesting question. Table tennis, maybe? Each volley is the right length for a TikTok video, and some of them (certainly not all) have spectacular long-distance lob+smash plays.
Seems like it plays well with vertical video orientation too.
post-game Chess analysis, diving, skis/snowboards/bikes/skateboards/etc doing tricks, any sports bloopers or amazing single plays (like the dad holding a beer and a baby who manages to also catch a foul ball, racing crashes, curling throws...
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