[Hitch]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

That would certainly crush innovation. With eternal patent, anyone wanting to make a bow and arrow would have to pay the holder of the patents of the pointed stick, the arrow, the fletch, the bow and the string. The number of people who would need to be paid would be staggering. Metallurgy would require paying people for thousands of years of innovations.

With all due respect, it doesn't seem to have stifled innovation whatsoever, has it? Whether it's medicines, in which case, competitors try to find a less-expensive or more-efficacious alternative, or it's Ford trying to beat GM, the mere existence of patent hasn't stifled invention one iota. If anything, it seems to stimulate other people to try to build a better mousetrap, to (wait for it) make money with that better mousetrap, don't you think? I'm not arguing for "eternal patent," by the way, but obviously, patent didn't preclude different car companies starting up, nor different airplane manufacturers, furniture-makers, and so on and so forth.

With a limit on the period of patent, inventors get the exclusive right to their inventions, in exchange for it entering the public domain. They are free to forgo patent; they can opt to make it a trade secret. If they do so, they can have exclusive use of the technology for as long as they can keep it secret.

Yes, which seems to not really work very well, generally speaking, but--so they do. To do so, they severely narrow their marketplace (I'm talking about normal inventors, rather than Apple). Or they license their product to be used by OTHER companies, who can build on top of their invention. This is obviously the case, or we'd all be sitting here writing to each other with paper and quills, wouldn't we? The massive rush of innovation of the 19th and 20th centuries in particular just doesn't really seem to argue your case for you.

Copyright - if excessively long - does make works disappear. They cease to be offered for sale and effectively vanish.

Yes, but isn't that their writer's prerogative? To sit on his book for however long the copyright grants? Let's take the discussion to extremes, which is always how you test a theorem: Assume I have an unpublished but complete novel sitting in my desk. For all intents and purposes, it's copyrighted from the date I finished it. At what point, exactly, are you entitled to a copy in the public domain? Let's not forget: copyright has precisely nothing to do with whether or not a book is ever published or released, just as patent doesn't mean something will ever be built. Legally, when is the public entitled to my unpublished manuscript? It's copyrighted--so, given that I live in the US, when, exactly, do you think that the public should be able to see it, and use it as they see fit?

I don't see why you should be taken aback, they go hand in hand. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies may not be great literature, but it's far from the only example of derivative works. The Brothers Grimm were free to do as they wished with the stories they collected because they were in the public domain. Mark Twain needed no permission to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Disney was free to do as they wished with the source material for their movies. About every year someone does a remake of Alice in Wonderland. We're better off because people can reinterpret these works.

I'm not advocating for an end to copyright. I'm not even advocating for a reduction in the terms of copyright, merely that it should not be extended without limit.

Again, with all due respect, in both the cases of the Brothers Grimm and Twain, that's not quite on point. The Brothers Grimm collected, tweaked, edited, rewrote and refined folk tales and compiled them--they didn't just regurgitate someone else's already-written work, or append an editor's note and reprint it. Much of what they produced was created from verbal storytelling. (Like talking about...Santa Claus, or the Boogeyman). In Twain's case, Arthur is a figure of legend. His "character" is not subject to copyright, and arguably, Twain didn't grab the Arthur of Le Morte d'Arthur. (He may have--but 400 years had passed). Those, I think, should not be part of any discussion about "derivative" works, in the context we're using, do you?

I don't disagree that copyright shouldn't be "forever;" I've never argued that. I do think it's reasonable that an author receives life plus X, or at least, some fixed length of time, regardless of whether he dies the day after he publishes or 90 years later. And I certainly disagree that copyright should expire upon death as a fixed point in time, due to the reasons I cited earlier. Far too many people seem to look upon royalties paid post-death to the survivors as some type of "unjust enrichment," (which sounds pretty similar to the green-eyed monster, to me) without having the slightest understanding of what most royalty checks really look like, or how estates truly pass from a legal standpoint.

I just...much of what gets discussed, not merely here, on this thread, but "around" the Net in general, feels sort of...venomous to me. As if writers don't work, or don't earn what they receive. Now, sure, JK Rowling may well be the richest woman in the world, but, hey...isn't she the inspiration for zillions of would-be's on Amazon? Who knows how many great books will be written by wanna-be JK's? (I don't mean imitators, per se; I just mean people inspired by her story.)

I know a lot of working authors--I don't mean the Dan Browns of the world, although I'm lucky to know a few of those, also--but the everyday, put-out-a-novel-a-year authors. Now, sure, there are a few Rex Stouts in the world, who put out a novel a month or 4x a year, but I know exceedingly few who don't put in an 8-hour or more day, between writing, marketing, meeting fans, readings, email...they're not sitting on their duffs collecting huge checks. It's a job, like any other. If some folks would stop romanticizing it (or dismissing it) as some glamorous thing, and realize that it's just a job, I think that reasonable people could come up with numbers that make sense, for all parties. Between folks imagining that authors just type up a novel in a few days, versus the other end of the spectrum, people wanting books ASAP without paying for them, it creates a pretty big gap to bridge.

Just my $.02. (Again. For the nth time. I swear, I really am trying to be done with this thread. I just happen to have a lot of experience in the area. )

Hitch