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Originally Posted by Sil_liS
As you can see, the fact that there are free versions of PD books doesn't stop people from taking those books and selling them.
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Well, sure, they can sell them to readers who don't have eReaders. In a couple years, ten at most, that group will IMHO be too small to support keeping most classics in print. A few people will make money from print on demand, but that will decline as well.
I don't know whose side in the debate the coming collapse of the market for classic PB's favors. But I just wanted to mention it as relevant.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
. . . the posthumous works of J.R.R. Tolkein edited and published by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkein. We certainly wouldn't have that without copyright protection.
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Famous people ordinarily are, in old age, solicited by libraries for their papers. Graduate students and professors read those archives and if they find publishable material, it should eventually be released by a subsidized university press. The resultant books are then mostly sold to libraries. I suppose that this whole process is just a little more likely to happen if copyright extends past the life of the famous man or woman.
As for Tolkien, I gather that he left papers to Marquette University, with holdouts by the Tolkien Estate. Wikipedia downtime is making it hard to get the details at the moment, so I probably did not explain this correctly. But I would think that if copyright expired at death, the works being published by the Tolkien Estate would be published by the subsidized scholarly system.
Having said this, lack of copyright after death would likely lead posthumous works by less celebrated authors to languish unpublished. This is one reason why I think the length of copyright should be based on years since writing rather than years after death. You shouldn't get residuals at age 70 on something you did at age 30, but if you die at 71, we should incentivize the estate to quickly, before copyright runs out, publish any good posthumous works.