Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Oookay. We know there was a time with no copyright and that some of Disney's work is based on those works. What isn’t established is that Disney could well have come up with his own stories is the others had been copywrited.
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Perhaps he could have, but he didn't. If you had perpetual copyright, you lose the ability to explore minor characters from well known stories, like Gilbert's and Stoppard's plays on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or, yes, all the Disney stories like Pinocchio and Snow White which were derivative works. In the case of Pinocchio, it was written in 1883, and the author died in 1890, so the 1940 movie had just entered public domain in most of Europe, although it would have been in the public domain in the US for almost 30 years.
Right now, they estimate that over half of the copyrighted works in the US between 1923 and 1963 either didn't get renewed, or if they got renewed, nobody knows who currently has the rights to them. With perpetual copyright, that's only going to get worse. For the works where nobody kept track, either because it had been out of print so long that they forgot, or the author or heirs died intestate, or the records between the publisher and creator got lost (for example, the publisher went out of business, or got sold) so nobody can proved the rights anymore, the works would be lost, because without clear proof of ownership, they would never get reprinted.
You'd also end up with situations like that of Edgar Pangborn, whose literary estate eventually went to Peter Beagle. Here in the US, the only books available are used books and the ebook editions of the books in the public domain because he or his heirs didn't renew the copyright. Beagle presumable could make arrangements with a publisher, but my impression is that he's been so wrapped up with his own problems with his former agent, that he'll never get around to doing so. Another author lost to oblivion.
Sure, many authors lose relevance over time. But sometimes, it's nice to discover the chain of influence from author to author. But with perpetual copyright, that would get harder and harder as more authors get progressively inaccessible when the number of sales drop too low, and when someone owning the rights dies without clearly passing the ownership on to the next generation.
Finally, for the past several centuries, we've had a time-limited copyright. Everybody who produces a creative work knows that their heirs won't be able to benefit from it eventually. There are very few works with enough appeal that they remain income generators a century later. Why should we relegate the rest of creative works to oblivion for the benefit of the few creative work owners that are making money off of them that much later? Or worse yet, end up with a couple of corporations who end up owning something like 90% of all creative works because they specialize in buying the entire creative estate from dying artists or their heirs for a pittance? Especially, if they make their business model "buy dead authors works for next to nothing, and then extract larger settlements from authors and/or publishers for any similarities to the dead author's work".