Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
The thought that somebodu wrote memoirs just before they dies to make money for the people surviving them have never occurred to me.
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They don't write them to make money for the survivors--but if their family can't reasonably profit from it, many people may decide not to bother. Or may write it, and not publish. (If they're not going to be around to see it succeed or fail, why bother?)
Or, more likely, to tell their (probably adult) child to publish in *his* name, because that lets the family control the rights. I don't think I want a system that encourages obscuring the actual author in order to keep the rights active.
How would you verify who *really* wrote a thing if copyright expired with death of the author? What measures would be taken to assure that the actual author was the author-of-record? (Simple solution: Incorporate the family! Register all works to the corporation, which has a longer copyright!)
Is a mess. I want copyright to go back to a fixed term, with any optional extensions to cost money. Maybe not even more than a token amount; a $20 re-reg fee every 20 years would allow *works that the authors don't care about* to fall into the public domain. I don't care if Disney keeps The Mouse forever; I want the B-movies from the 30s and 40s to be thrown into the public domain, along with the thousands of books languishing in libraries that nobody's reprinting because some publisher re-registered it in 1956 but hasn't reprinted it since 1958.