Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
What your examples are missing is the understanding that the period of copyright is about acquiring "the profits of their labour" (or trying to). Example one is being paid as he goes. Example two is hoping that he will eventually get paid something. When person one dies his superannuation and outstanding wages are still his, they don't fall into the public domain just because he died.
The second may, eventually, also get money to invest the same way as example one, but he's also lost the investment period between the labour and the income (if any) for that labour. This is not trying to "cry poor", it's merely pointing out that they are different income models and such simple comparisons don't hold up very well.
I do have a certain amount of sympathy for this view - that the retrospective changes to copyright may seem unfair, it wasn't the original bargain. But aside from the few outliers, the evil corporations who gain large profit from this change, I don't actually see the change as that significant overall - not in its real value impact to the public domain. (But, as noted earlier, my own priorities lean heavily toward wanting original, not derivative work.)
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Are you saying that the public domain would not be enriched by the works (at least in part) of Hemmingway, Faulkner, Hammett, Chandler, Cabell, the golden age of Science Fiction writings, Doc Savage, The Shadow, various poets (e e cummings, Frost, ect), Thurber, Zane Grey, ect? (All of which would have been in the public domain for their writing from 1923 to 1956, as of this post.)
And that's not including movies, and potentially music (special situation) and other artforms.
The public domain in the US has been frozen for 34 years (and will remain frozen for at least another 6 years), just to keep the coffer big media players filled. Everywhere else in the world has Public Domain day every year, we've had 1 P.D. day in 35 years (and that was considered an accident that should never have happened.)