Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
He's entitled to some financial recompense for his work, don't you think? How would he get that if the items were in the public domain?
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Exceptions make for bad law. I'm a big Tolkien fan and greatly admire the dedication that Christopher Tolkien has shown over the years. I just picked up a copy of "Berend and Luthien" and have a first printing, first edition of the Silmarillion on my book self. It was the first hardback that I bought with my own money. I also think there is a ton of material in the Silmarillion that would make great movies for years to come. I hope they do it.
But the Tolkien estate is literally one in a million. For every Tolkien there are hundreds of thousands of works that are abandon and forgotten. I suspect that if we simply had a system in place where the copyright holder had to renew their copyright every decade for a nominal fee, then there would be little discussion about copyrights. You could even tweak it so that an individual copyright holder could renew all his copyrights at one time so it wouldn't be a burden on the copyright holder.