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Originally Posted by Fluribus
But does extending copyright lengths far beyond an author's death really cause more people to write? I'd be strongly concerned about providing for a wife and young children. Not so much concerned about providing for adult children. Maybe a college fund for grandchildren. I'd find it very difficult to shoulder any burdens beyond that. At some point copyright length provides no motivation for anybody.
The program briefly mentioned the difficulty of finding many rights holders. What about a work that was unjustly ignored, faded into obscurity, should be resurrected but the current rights holder can't be found.
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I am all for a reform of copyright that provides for books that haven't been in print for a fair time being fair game subject to a thorough search for the copyright holders.
Most books that have faded into obscurity have done so because they were ignored, in most cases justly I think.
I am a person who is inclined to worry about my heirs, and I have no children
. I know many people who live thriftily when they don't have to for just this reason. Building their savings for their descendants. Other friends spend more than they make and one guy told me it was his ambition to die as far in debt as possible. It is a type of genetic programming. You have the ant and the grasshopper and those who fall somewhere in between.
But as I have said before, worrying about me or my heirs paying a few cents or even dollars a year to rights holders who inherited these rights, is not even on my list of worries. If the book has value for me, they are welcome to it whether the author cared or not. I am thrifty but hopefully not miserly.
Helen