Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
I wasn't talking about the case when the publisher owns the copyright, but publishers do have an innate characteristic as they are the ones who make copies.
Copyright law gives temporary monopoly to the author but the author doesn't make copies, so publishers end up enjoying the temporary monopoly which is why I say that copyright benefits the publishers.
When copyright is extended it means that there are more works that publishers can have monopoly over, so the value of the work (i.e. how much a publisher is willing to pay the author) decreases so this hurts authors. This isn't immediately apparent if you think of it from the point of view of older works. Their authors had their works valued higher as copyright was shorter and there was less competition, and now simply get extra time to gather benefits. But the creation of new works will suffer.
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Are you saying that there was less competition because copyright was shorter or that works were valued higher because there was less competition?
I don't see that anything will decrease competition significantly at this point short of a catastrophic event.
And while I have nothing against derivative works per se, I see plenty of non derivative works being published, as well as derivative ones.
I understand that making it possible for anyone to create a work based on current bestsellers would make many people happy, especially those with very limited tastes, but I fail to see a large benefit to society of allowing anyone to freely use the creations of others. Sure we would have more Nero Wolfe novels, Harry Dresden, Sookie Stackhose etc. and many would be good I am sure, but would it make the world an infinitely better place or tend to devalue the original creations?
Perhaps it would keep those who only read Harry Potter books (and I know two adults who do) happy and that is enough?
Helen