Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
So you feel entitled to have anything older than 40(?) years for free? (I'm assuming you're not talking about the newer albums of The Who.)
It's all very well to get sarcastic about how little the famous few need the money, but understand that copyright isn't really about them - if there were fees involved in extending copyright then they could certainly afford to pay them. Copyright is a much bigger topic than a few famous people.
Well, I was talking about the "public interest" - if the public is interested then I would consider that (at least potentially) significant. If there is no interest then availability wouldn't seem to be much of an issue.
Why do you think losing the copyright holder must be as common as before? It seems to me that our record keeping has improved considerably in the last hundred years or so.
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It's not just about getting things above a certain age for free... although that is a driver for some people. It's also about the simple fact that extended copyright terms make it ever more likely that some works for which there is a real but small audience may be kept out of the public eye.
Free works are just a side-effect of the public domain. The real strength is its ability to fertilize the ideas of the next generation, and that can't happen when works are locked away or lost. Disney isn't even the real problem, they make keep things under copyright for too long (in my opinion) but they also make sure to keep their properties in the public discourse. It limits derivative works, but the capacity for inspiration remains.
The problem with records is that even though record-keeping has been getting better, as long as copyright keeps getting extended it's still bound by the record-keeping of the nineteen-twenties. Record-keeping from the twenties to the fifties isn't getting any better, and the more time that passes, the more records from the earliest part of that era are being lost rather than being kept and updated. Modern record-keeping is better, the records they kept in the past are exactly the same.
The more time that passes, the more likely it becomes that records will be lost, and with them the copyright holders.
This is one reason why I like to tie copyright terms to the publication of the work, not the life of the author. It makes it much easier to track things down.