Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
The UK? Most of Western Europe?
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Did you see #41? murrarypaul makes a point there, seemingly in support of what I wrote, that I hadn't thought of.
My mind was more on political upheavals such as Henry VIII giving church lands to his nobles, the English Civil War, the Restoration, the French Revolution, and the end of the Papal States.
Of course, some land has been more or less handed down in the same ownership chain for 500 years, as murraypaul notes in #42. Just not most.
Getting back to books, a lot of great authors didn't have children (Brontės) or have no surviving descendents (Shakespeare). I don't see who today could speak for them. Where survivors exist, there's no real reason to believe they would respect, or even know, the author's preferences for how to deal with his or her literary property. I don't even see who could say whether Hemingway would want his stuff DRM'd.