Quote:
Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer
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A lot of the "extend it forever!" sentiment on copyright seems to come from a childish idea of creation where artists pull new expressions fully-formed from the void in a supreme act of creation, rather than by being built on the backs of old expressions.
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As far as I can tell, the extend it forever sentiment is driven by two major forces. The first is the financial dynamic of a small handful of uber successful properties such as Disney, Rowling and Tolkien where we are talking about properties that continue to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) a year. This is a huge gravy train for a lot of very wealthy people.
The second is the view by some artists that their specific works is their property for eternity to do with what they want. In some cases, it's pure emotion (Ellison comes to mind), in other cases it's a combination. I read one author's blog who referred to his fairly substantial backlist as his 401K.
My personal take is a good rule of thumb is that as long as I can buy a work in the medium that I want, at a reasonable price, I have no problem with the artist or the artists heirs getting the proceeds. I take a somewhat different view of the public value of copyright that some seem to. I see the public good being the public having various artistic representations available to them rather than other artists being able to use that work as a starting point.
The public get zero good out of a work that is not publicly available. The value of Huck Finn is that the public at large is able to read the work, not that some guy can write a porno novel based on it. To take an example, if I can't read Doc Smith's Lensman series because it's under copyright and the copyright holder is either unknown or unwilling to make it available, then there is no public good.