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Originally Posted by HarryT
Why do you have this fixation that copyright has something to do with writing books? Copyright gives you (or your heirs - for 70 years, anyway) the right to control distribution of what you've already written.
There's no difference between an author dieing, and a living author simply deciding to stop writing. His books still "live on", regardless of whether he's writing any more.
Look at that woman whose name entirely escapes me at the moment who wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird". She wrote that when she was young and (AFAIK) hasn't written another word since. She's lived on the income from sales of that book. By your argument, presumably she shouldn't be allowed to earn any money from it if she isn't writing any more?  |
Harper Lee wrote
To Kill a Mockingbird.
from Flint's article which i linked to on the first page, about how long copyright should last :
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First, authors need to have enough protection to enable them to be able to make a living as full-time writers.
Second, that protection has to be long enough to provide them with a motivation to write for the public, and see doing so as a possible profession.
But that's it. Those are the only two legitimate concerns. Any term of copyright which exceeds that minimum necessary length, as Macaulay put it in the quote I cited in my last column, has no legitimate purpose. Once you cross that line, a necessary evil has simply become an evil—and the farther past that line you go, the more evil it gets.
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copyright only exists to encourage writers to keep writing. it's not intended to be some kind of eternal cash cow.