Quote:
Originally Posted by avantman42
While I would like to see copyright laws change, I firmly believe that terms for existing copyrighted material should not change, whether terms are shortened or extended. Anyone who already has copyrighted material has agreed to a given set of rules - I don't think it's fair to change the rules after the agreement has been made.
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How about reverting copyright to the length in place when a piece was originally published, which would put a lot of books & movies into the public domain?
Everything published in the US before 1955 would be in the public domain if the laws hadn't been changed. I don't see how putting things back to the expectations that existed when those things were published hurts those authors/musicians/film creators; after all, 28+28 was enough incentive for them at the time.
Or bring back the 28+28 list, and give them 5 years to register anything that's more than 28 years old, and everything before ~1983 that's not registered can fall into the public domain. At the time they published it, re-registration was an expectation; why should that be revoked?
And note that now, "anyone who already has copyrighted material" is EVERY CHILD WHO CAN WRITE. Every 3rd-grade assignment about "what my family does for birthday dinners" is protected by copyright, for Life+70. Every grocery list. Every doodle in the margins of a concert flyer. It is *ridiculous* that all that material, everything written or drawn or posted on the internet, should be locked away from open use for the next hundred-or-so years.