View Single Post
Old 03-01-2012, 10:41 AM   #17
bill_mchale
Wizard
bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.bill_mchale ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 1,451
Karma: 1550000
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Maryland, USA
Device: Nook Simple Touch, HPC Evo 4G LTE
Quote:
Originally Posted by Belfaborac View Post
Copyright should definitely end with the death of the author. It is the only natural cut-off point, whereas the other suggestions are arbitrary. Anything less than the lifespan on the author is also unreasonable in my opinion (like the ten years suggested above), as I fail to see any good reason to remove control from the author while he or she lives.

That said, I very much enjoyed the OP.
I think your conclusions make certain assumptions about the purpose of copyright. At least in the United States I will go with the Constitution where at least one of the purposes of copyright is to provide an incentive to authors to create and publish more works. So any term of copyright should be tested against this idea.

Having life copyright can provide a significant disincentive for an author to publish new works. One wonders whether J.D. Salinger would have spent his last 40-50 years not publishing anything if he had been unable to rely on the royalty checks for Catcher in the Rye?

Likewise, knowing that the work can provide income for his family after death can provide an author who is late in life an incentive to write one last book (And an incentive for publishing companies to purchase it).

Personally, i wish we could go back to a fixed length copyright. Having something like 25 years fixed would make a lot more sense in my mind.

--
Bill
bill_mchale is offline   Reply With Quote