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Originally Posted by tubemonkey
It doesn't matter when it happens (during or after the author's life), it's up to the rights holders to negotiate the terms. If ownership gets fragmented over time and it becomes financially unfeasible to track down and bring the parties together, then too bad.
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Again, you are missing a big part of the whole point of copyright. A big part of the justification for copyright in the first place is that it encourages authors and rights holders to publish their works so that they will be available to the public. Regardless of whether copyright expires or not, if copyright does not serve to make works available to the general public, then it is failing in its very reason for existance.
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Society does not have a right to any work of art due to a passage of time. It's up to the rights holders to make that determination.
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Actually it does. If you choose to take advantage of the protections offered by copyright (i.e., when you publish), you have implicitly accepted a social contract. That social contract explicitly states that copyright will expire after a given amount of time. Therefore, by virtue of you using copyright to protect your work, society does in fact have a right to that work at the end of the period of copyright.
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Bill