Quote:
Originally Posted by Elsi
I like a flat 50 years. Even if an author is 21 when his first book is published and is still living when it goes out of copyright, it is highly likely that he has written more books in the intervening 50 years and has potential income from those works.
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Let's say you are 21. You write a novel. You reach the age of 72. Your work just became public domain. Some movie stuido decided to make a movie based on your work. The movie studio makes tons and tons of money from this movie. You are still alive, watching others make lots of money from your work and there is not a thing you can do about it. That is not fair in the least. You would be so pissed off. If the author is still alive, I do feel that he/she should be able to keep the copyright and make money on the work. I voted for 30 years after death for the work to become PD. But I also feel that once this 30 years after death has happened, any work that that author has written should be fully pD. And that includes someone else finding an unfinished manuscript, making it be finished and publishing it. So once the 30 years after death happens, that too becomes PD. So all those Tolkien books published after his death (even though they should have stayed unpublished) , would also go PD at the same time as the other books.