Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
Too complicated.
Since the purpose of copyright is to give the author a way to make money off the work he did, giving any rights to descendants makes no sense.
|
Too complicated to administer, perhaps, but not "making no sense."
Copyrights are property. The holder of the property has the right to dispose of it as desired, including passing it along to designated heirs specified in a will. If the property has value and is producing income, the question becomes even more acute.
Let's say you are married with kids, and are the breadwinner for your family. Let's further say that you earn the bread as a writer. You have a novel on the best seller list. You die unexpectedly. What happens to the income?
Under your theory, the rights to the book have just become non-existent. what happens to the income earned by it? A publisher could theoretically say "It's now in the public domain, so we are under no obligation to pay further royalties to the family of the deceased. We can keep the money and add it to our bottom line."
Somehow, I'm not sure that's what you have in mind.
Copyright laws originally assumed the form they have now to protect the rights of the author and the author's direct descendants. They've been extended to protect the interest of corporations that now own some rights, and don't want to see them enter the public domain, (Think DisneyCo and Mickey Mouse...)
The simplest solution I see is a "Life+X years" copyright for an individual, but a different sort of rights for a business, that won't simply die. From where I sit, Disney is welcome to perpetual rights on Mickey and friends. I'm just not happy about the process they use to obtain them leading to a situation where nothing else ever comes out of copyright, either.
______
Dennis