Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
"We offer low prices by cheating the other fellow and passing the saving on to you..."
Tubemonkey, if you believe in perpetual I.P., then there can be no public domain. What is now public domain would have to be owned by someone (probably the government) and back royalties would have to be paid, and ongoing royalties paid to the owner, in perpetuity.
Otherwise, you're just cheating one set of corpses to the benefit of another set...
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The "problem" is that, apart from corporate-owned works, it soon becomes impossible to determine who it is that deserves to be paid royalties for older works. The only clear path is to not republish and let the old work die in obscurity. That helps those producing new works control the market, but is against old works and culture in general.
I have to say that I have strong, mixed feelings about tubemonkey's opinion. On the one hand, I hate the loss to our general culture. On the other, I have a malicious joy in foreseeing the burial of the works of those individual authors who thought they would have generations-long control of their flourishing "IP" via permanent copyright. Here's a hint for those in the latter camp: if long copyrights are currently helping kill your competition from past works, so will they also help kill your works when the time comes.