Quote:
Originally Posted by ekbell
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For every C. S. Lewis or Tolkien, for every Mickey Mouse there's hundreds if not thousands of enjoyable works that didn't provide enough of a pay out to stay in print. [and the experience of the US shows that allowing renewable copyright just confuses the issue]
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The disappearing works is the great tragedy of the long copyright period. There are books that I read 40 years ago which likely now have zero commercial value. I see no benefit to society for those works to disappear.
There are of course, easy solutions to the problem. Heck, just make copyright contingent on renewing it every X years after the initial 28 years. That way, authors or rights holders who want to keep the rights can, and those who become orphaned or who no longer wish to maintain the right can go into public domain. I would go with 1 year, but perhaps that's not practical. As long as it's every few years you get the same effect. The vast majority of books would go into public domain after the initial 28 years since the vast majority of books earn most of their money within a few months of the initial publication.
But as I said before, it won't happen because there is no one who is looking to reform copyright, only copyright holders who are looking to extend those rights forever.