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Originally Posted by norway1456
....the legacy of Dracula would not have been, and I think it is safe to assume that the popularity of the vampire genre (I think the word is gothic) would not have been what it is today if Dracula had not entered the public domain early.
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And yet, we have the entire fantasy genre essentially growing out of the works of Tolkien, without infringing his copyrights.
We also see quite a few big authors allowing non-commercial derivative works (aka fanfic).
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Originally Posted by norway1456
By todays laws, the works of Jules Verne would have been in copyright until 1975, and unavailable to Disney (at least without an agreement with Vernes heirs) at the time.
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So, you get an agreement.
Have you
not noticed how many movies are made off of properties still under copyright, including years of superhero movies?
It's also unclear that, for example, the
Lord of the Rings would in fact benefit from every nerd in existence making their own LOTR movie, writing their own LOTR video game, and so on.
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Originally Posted by norway1456
When the copyright is too long, it will block innovation and creativity, and actually have the opposite effect from the intended effect.
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And yet, we are still surrounded by utter tons of new material, and more people are writing books than ever before.
PD is good, but I don't take the claims that "zomg it's killing creativity" all that seriously. In turn, I don't think a set period of 50 years would kill creativity either.