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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
I have no objection to making sure the author of a work profits from the work they have produced. However, an accident of birth should not provide someone with an immediate right to collect profits. Even someone who inherits a major corporation has to work to ensure it remains profitable; not so with the inheritor of the right copyright.
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The inheritor of a copyright, like the inheritor of a business, can often count on market inertia providing some profit for a while. After that, however, it'll take work to convince the market to keep buying.
A copyrighted work is only profitable if it has (1) an audience who's willing to pay for it and (2) a marketable form to bring to that audience. Owning the copyright doesn't bring you profit any more than owning a storefront does.
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Even worse after a couple of generations, it might literally become impossible to track down everyone who has inherited a stake in a book. Even with life +70 years it is often difficult to track down everyone who owns a share of the rights.
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And it's much worse with multi-creator works, like movies and a lot of songs. The reason there's no digital versions of a lot of movies from the 30s-50s isn't because nobody wants to make them, nor because the copyright holders are demanding too much money... it's because nobody feels safe enough with the permissions they can get, because they know that failing to track down the person with the rights to a snippet of music somewhere in the middle, or the font designer for the title sequence, can mean bankruptcy down the line.
The problem with L+70 copyrights isn't that "those lazy heirs can just coast on their grandfather's hard work"--people have always been allowed to hand off a profitable business to descendents who hopefully won't have to work as hard--but that often, those heirs can't be identified or tracked down, especially when one or more "heirs" is a publishing company, which may have been bought by another company, which may have gone bankrupt & had its assets sold in an auction, and nobody knows what happened to the copyrights.