Quote:
Originally Posted by usuallee
[...]I do feel the current terms are ludicrously long.[...]
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I tend to agree that life+70 is too long. Corporate and rich personal estates may be able to manage things this long, but they are already in a position to have made the most out of their rights before this time. The more common situation of small personal estates are the ones that are likely to run into problems with management for 70 years, and where they have probably seen most of what they are likely to see (financially) well before this time. For the practical purposes already noted I think the "life+" aspect of copyright needs to remain, but my own inclination is that somewhere in the 30..50 year range after that would be a more appropriate compromise between serving the personal and public interests.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I'm not sure that the problem is recordkeeping. It might be that it has to do with legal issues, and that these haven't changed, or at least haven't gotten less common.
I don't have an internet age example of an eBook becoming unavailable, but I do have one for music. Everything here was once available at record stores throughout the US, and, for all I know, the world:
http://www.showmusic.com/showmusic/P.../pscds.htm#TOP
Ben Bagley, the leading personality and apparent owner of Painted Smiles Records, died in 1998. His star-studded, often rave-reviewed, product line is (despite my misleading link) now unavailable, except, sometimes, for used LP's and CD's. No iTunes, no Spotify, no Amazon MP3.
Why? I don't really know. But I can't believe demand is zero.*
I wonder what would have happened if Bagley had lived a few years longer, and made an agreement for his line to go on iTunes. Then, one day, perhaps shortly after Bagley died, Apple would presumably have gotten a royalty check returned as undeliverable. Would they have pulled the products, or still sell them?
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* Someone may check and see that iTunes does sell one Bagley recording, apparently because it is distributed by a still-existing record company. |
The merging of production and creation in this case could be seen as a useful parallel to self-publishing a book. Lose the one person that does both and you increase the chances of losing access - at least for a time.
The works, as far as I could see, are not orphaned as such, merely not available at the moment. With sufficient demand someone managing the estate may decide to accept offers to change that. As you noted, had he lived a bit longer he may well have come to the point where these albums were published in electronic form - and that would have made it much easier for his estate to decide to keep them available. It doesn't guarantee it would happen, but if there is demand for the albums then it would have to improve the chances I would think - even if the estate simply decided to sell off the rights to someone that was willing to keep it going. And that's largely my point, with transaction costs on the Internet being so low, it doesn't take much interest to keep electronically published items available.