Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Which is exactly why I said you had explained the reason for copyright. The possibility of making an income, even if slim, is enough that many people do take the gamble, as a way to justify spending more time doing the thing they love doing. Take away that incentive and some people would still write, but there is much less chance anyone else would see it.
|
I fully agree with that, but then again, I don't see a reason for a copyright to last as long as 70 years after the creator's death.
As is pointed out in this and other threads, many copyrighted works just go out of print, because it's not economically viable for the copyright holder to produce then anymore. There are not enough people who want to read them, so they'd incur a loss on the production.
Had these works been out of copyright, they'd have been in the public domain already. Someone would have created an e-book out of them, just for the love of it, and then it would have been available to the (small number) of people who wanted to read it.