Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
The classics are still sold because people still like to read them and if they weren't in public domain they could be sued if they didn't pay out to the author (or his estate). Those sales I have no doubt provide some of the income that the publisher needs in order to publish new authors and/or new books by still living published authors.
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The second sentence is a very good point, and one I haven't seen in this discussion before.
It seems to me that very long copyright (including indefinitely prolonged, as suggested by Tubemonkey) is good for big business, while shorter copyright is good for small businesses, and no copyright (or so short that any investments become risky) is bad for most of us as it leads to less new art.
If a company pays a huge sum for a franchise (like
the 4 billion USD for Star Wars, as leebase mentioned in another thread), it will, naturally, want to get return for its investment. This means:
- Making lots of films, TV series, etc from the franchise. So the starting point for making a film won't be "Here's a good story we want to tell, what kind of world and characters does it need?", it will be "We need to tell more stories in this world, reusing these characters. Let's come up with something." In other words, the desire to use the valuable IP will come first, not the desire to tell a story in the best way it can be told.
- Little willingness to take risks with the stories. This applies both to artistic choices, and willingness to engage with social issues.
- Investing more in the IP. Huge budgets for making films, huge budgets for advertising. This isn't bad in itself, but it does make it even harder for other films to compete.
All in all, these extremely valuable IPs will, especially for film and TV series, lead to less artistic variation, and less variation in who get to tell their stories. The market will be dominated by huge colossi (colossuses?)
I don't think the same issues apply as much to books, maybe because the minimum investments are smaller? Behemoths like Harry Potter and Fifty Shades of Grey don't seem to have pushed out other books, instead they have made their genres more popular, and probably made more people into readers.
So I'm returning to my suggestion from earlier in the thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
I'd like to consider allowing transformative (or derivative? I'm not entirely sure of the difference) works made for profit when the copyright is held by a business (not an individual) after a much shorter time, like 5 or 10 years.
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As for the discussions about definitions of property, I frankly don't see the point. There's nothing inherently good (or bad) about property rights, regardless of whether we are talking about physical property, immaterial property, or real estate. We're hairless apes making up rules to make it easier to rub along with each other. The human rules about ownership are no more inherently good or right than the chimpanzee rules about status.