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Originally Posted by corroonb
The point I was making is that if you argue for copyright on the moral basis of the author deserving a reward for their labour (as HarryT most certainly did among others), then you have no logical reason not to extend that argument to every author or creator who ever lived. Does death remove their right to be rewarded? Not according to current copyright law in most countries in the world. Does the moral right simply end at their death and thereafter there is only the legal right of their descendants to proceeds but not a moral right?
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That is a strawman argument. The fact that there is a moral argument for something doesn't mean that it is the only argument, merely that it is *an* argument, which can be balanced with other arguments. In fact, we *do this all the time*; societies work by balancing moral imperatives against each other and against practical concerns.
There is a moral claim for punishing burglars. That doesn't mean that we are torn between executing them or not punishing them at all. There are lots of countervailing claims.
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The problem with using such moral arguments as the basis for copyright is that they are not compatible with current copyright law or common sense. Although current copyright law is utter nonsense for the most part. If it ended at death, that would at least make some sense. It should either expire at death or be infinite. Any half-way, arbitrary limit is just the kind of nonsense lawyers love to concoct.
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Wrong. See above.
There are at least two good reasons for extending copyright beyond death. The first is to allow the purchaser to have some certainty about what he's buying: otherwise, you might hesitate to buy the rights to a work produced by an older person or a person with a disease, out of fear that if the person died, the work would suddenly be in the public domain and you would have wasted your money. The second, related reason, is that it insures that even elderly writers can get a decent amount of money for their works...otherwise, publishers might just hold off on buying anything from someone 70+, on the theory that it would become free soon enough.