Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
Ah, but what about all those movies that began as books? Treasure Island, Moby Dick, The Time Machine, and many more. And different movie studios may base movies on the same book and yet copyright other aspects such as the makeups. For example both Universal Pictures and Hammer Studios have made movies based on Frankenstein but Hammer had to come up with its own look for the creature since Universal owned the rights to their adaptation starring Boris Karloff. If Frankenstein were still in copyright there wouldn't have been so many movies (starting with Tom Edison's short) based on the story. First came the book, then a stage play and then finally the first movie.
|
What about them? Obviously all the movies you mention were based on books that were already in the PD. Sure there are plenty of movies where someone buys the movie rights of a book, but generally the movie rights aren't all that much compared to what the movie actually makes. LOTR and Harry Potter are real rarities.
I have long held that a two tier copyright system would be best for all concerned. Most books fall in tier 1 with short copyright with only a handful in tier 2 with a longer copyright period. Something like the music industry, where you can purchase a license to record a song, but the copyright holder gets a set royalty would likely be the best compromise, IMPO. For that matter, I'm good with the idea of after a short period of time, say 14 years, most books go into a literary pool where any publisher can publish the book, but must pay a standard royalty based on the list price, purchase price, or fixed fee (whichever is higher).
The point of copyright, from a society point of view, is to have books available to the general audience. That's the public good, the trade off for giving the author/artist the government granted monopoly. Our current system fails that test miserably.