Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
You are implying that people are against writers profiting from their works. Maybe some of the more unapologetic 'pirates' are, but most people in this thread are just asking for a fair balance. By having a fixed term (I do think life of the author plus a bit is fair; life plus 50 is pushing it a little too far for my tastes; life plus 75 is imho unreasonable) the author gets to profit from their creations. But the author also has to acknowledge that they borrowed from those who came before and therefore that others in the future get to borrow from them in the same way. Baum go to borrow from the public domain to create The Wizard of Oz (he was not the first to write stories about little girl heroines, or fantastical worlds with flying creatures). So Baum's work goes into the public domain and Maguire borrows. And now the thank you that he gives those he borrowed from is that some say in the future (not right now, but someday, when the copyright expires after he is dead and gone) someone might borrow from him. Fair is fair. He did not create his work in a vacuum. But he did create it. So he gets protections for a fixed time, and then he compensates those who came before him by having his own work return to the pool of human culture from which others can later draw. I see nothing wrong with this.
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I'm not arguing with your length of time, but when you say borrowed--sure, we're influenced, but in some cases, we paid for the work. Shoot, if I think about who I believed influenced me most, I paid for ALL of those books because I wasn't a library-goer at the time. I was buying books then and a lot of them. If I look back at earlier influences (Nancy Drew, Trixie Beldon) most of my "payment" into the system was via my parents taxes because those were almost all library books.
I'm not saying others aren't influenced by PD works, but there's no real reason to argue FOR a specific shorter copyright (or longer) because it isn't as though a book is unavailable to influence someone just because it isn't PD. A writer could still buy the book and be influenced just fine. As I said, thinking about it, I'd say the most influences in my writing were largely books I bought.
I do agree that there needs to be a balance. It is even more true today that works can remain available (For sale or not) in an electronic form that makes them very accessible for longer periods of time. That has nothing to do with whether they are PD or not.
Perhaps your worry stems from the fact that currently older works can be impossible to obtain, but looking forward, that won't necessarily be the case.