Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Lister
I look at this from a completely different perspective. Can anyone name a single important work that copyright prevents me from obtaining in a reasonable amount of time, generally minutes, and at a reasonable cost, generally free?
So the impact is really limited to the legal distribution of works. That's it. Nothing else. So from that perspective, the longer the better; the more incentive it is to create. I personally wouldn't care if copyrights continued in perpetuity, with the stipulation that they must be renewed by interested parties after some reasonable period of time and potentially at some nominal cost.
Orphan works are an issue, but a different one.
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Like HarryT mentioned, there are tons of works that copyright prevents you from accessing. The examples are trivially easy to locate - scientific papers locked behind paywalls that charge thousands, famous speeches (Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech comes to mind since we're at the 50th anniversary), songs (performing "Happy Birthday" to more than a person or two will cost you a bundle), etc.
And even if it were true that you could access anything you like for free, that's not enough. For culture and society to flourish, you really need people to be able to remix, perform and sell works, and not just the original creator of those works. Consider how detrimental it would be if the estate of the next Shakespeare could prevent anyone else from ever reperforming or reimagining those plays?
Finally, I underlined a bit of text in your quote above so I could ask a question: Do you actually think there are people that hold off from creating written works because copyright only gives them a monopoly for decades rather than hundreds or thousands of years? If the answer is "no", then perpetual copyright makes no sense; if a forever-copyright doesn't actually encourage more works, then it is worse than useless.
Just to beat a dead horse, below is an excerpt from Adrian Hon's modest proposal for eternal copyright (
here):
Quote:
Imagine you're a new parent at 30 years old and you've just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the "public good", simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they'd just make it worse.
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