A freak accident hurls me back in time 25 years. Unable to return to 2018 and without a job in 1993, I have to have a way to make a living. At the time I had my accident, I happened to be holding a tablet computer with a 512 GB MicroSD drive containing many thousands of books, songs, TV shows, and movies. I decide to try to sell some of these to make money.
How does society and the legal system react to this? Will copyright be extended to keep me from profiting off material not yet created? What rights would the creators of the time-tangled content be given? I can see George Lucas being paid for The Force Awakens, having created much of the background material found in the movie andbut Harrison Ford would likely be cut a check, but would it be a payday for 1-year-old Daisy Ridley? Kenny Rodgers with his distinctive voice may get a piece of his latest album, but what about 4-year-old Taylor Swift? Would a trust be set up for Anthony Gonzalez for starring in Coco for when he is born 11 years later? And where would the money go if the changed timeline caused him to never be born?
It won’t matter because everyone would be so busy killing their grandfathers that no one would be left.
Seriously, I think it could be fixed if the copyright system became more like the patent system and those creating a copyrightable work would document the creative process. Drafts, sketches, ideas, outlines, that kind of stuff. Applying without the documentation won’t get you the copyright.
I’m assuming people can’t identify time travelers, or else that would make it easier.
Come to think of it, if you have published a work for copyright before it got written, the writer, probably being aware of it, would not have written it and instant time paradox.
In all probability society and the law act as one in this instance and immediately kill you, reduce your body to its component molecules, and destroy your tablet and drive beyond all hope of retrieval. All the while chanting “Kill the witch!”
If you are VERY lucky, you will be spirited away by the Men In Black and the mobs fury will fall on a suitable “replacement.” You will then be brain-vacuumed, then disposed of.
This was handled quite nicely in* Star Trek IV.* Scotty needed transparent aluminum, which hadn’t been invented yet, so he was about to explain how to make it.
McCoy: You realize of course that if we give him the formula we’re altering the future.
Scotty: Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?
The simple answer to this question is that information in a closed timelike curve appears out of thin air, that is, nobody actually wrote the books and movies (causality violation), which are therefore not copywritable.
I assume you yourself would not be worried by any of this as you would be turned inside-out, squashed to a point, incinerated, or all of the above by the “accident”. You were specifically told, “never cross the streams!”
The editors of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cribbed some info off the back of a cereal box. They then went back in time and sued the cereal maker for copyright infringement. <Paul Harvey voice> It’s true.
Is it too late to join the Campaign for Real Time?
In John Birmingham’s Axis of Time series in which a 21st century aircraft carrier group is transported back in time to WWII, with all sorts of movies, music and books, a profit-sharing system is created that benefits the creators who were living in WWII (young Elvis makes out well).
In Harry Turtledove’s “Hindsight” the person who “writes” classic SF stories before the actual writer could do so just makes out like a bandit (though she does actually write fictionalized versions of real history too (“Watergate” and “Three Mile Island” as I recall), which is kosher), without any compensation to the people she’s scooping.
Todd Thromberry didn’t compensate the fellow he was cribbing from either…
