Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
The simple reason is that what you own, according to the Constitution, is the right to control it's distribution for a limited time.
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Until 1891, US copyright law, under said Constitution, had zero protections for new books by authors lacking American citizenship. So I don't generally see the early American copyright model as a good one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
The original copyright term in the USA was 14 years, which could be extended once by registering it again. Personally I'd cut that in half but it's not really unreasonably long.
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I think that 14 years, and probably even 28 years, is so short that it would majorly reduce sales of new titles.
Life + 50 seems to me a reasonable compromise, besides having the benefit of greatest consistency with international law. It's long enough not to depress current sales more than a smidgen. Once copyright is long enough for that, there's no justification for it being longer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
How is $20 nominal?
To some people that would mean the difference between eating and starving.
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When I endorsed the $20 renewal fee, I wasn't thinking about the amount, but the principle that if no one cares enough to renew, the benefit is almost all on the side of letting the title go to public domain. If it was possible to amend the Berne Convention to require renewal, what I'd really want was a renewal fee that just barely covered the administrative cost of an efficiently managed renewal system.
Besides making a payment to fund the renewal process, the copyright holder should also have to certify that the title is still marketed in every country with freedom to read. In the eBook era, that should be no problem. More of a problem is getting international consistency.