Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
No, no, no, no, no!
It's not just the lack of derivative works. Although that is also a loss to society.
With perpetual copyright, the entire societal contract about copyright is broken.
The whole of society works to protect copyright, including the courts and the legislature. People have to pay more for the creations because their production is a monopoly during their copyright period. This is an enormous amount of effort and money spent solely to ensure that creators get a reward for their creations.
So why does society do this? Spend all this money and effort for the benefit of a small number of creators?
So that society can be enriched by the creations. And that means that once the creator has been 'sufficiently' rewarded, the creation is allowed to be used by anyone - the monopoly ceases.
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We know how things work without copyright. Copyright hasn't existed through most of history. We also can see a bit of the dynamic since up until fairly recently, the US didn't recognize foreign copyrights (thus the unauthorized edition of Lord of the Rings back in the 60's). For that matter, in the US, we saw that copyright worked perfectly well for time periods much shorter than life plus 70 (28 years plus the option of a 28 year extension).
It helps to know the history, both of copyright in English law and copyright in US law. I think that it's fair to speculate that without copyright, we wouldn't have nearly the number of books that we have. The flip side is that I think it's also fair to speculate that extending the copyright term from 28+28 to life+70 hasn't made much of a difference. It doesn't really help to have more writers writing books if they can't sell those books, so I would say that increased wealth, increased population and increased access to bookstores has had a much bigger impact on authors getting paid.