Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
I prefer something related to the lifetime of the author because to me, it's more clear. Any biographical entry will have date of birth and death, while publication date can be more tricky to find out . . .
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I agree. It may be that 80 years from now, it will be easy to check something like the Internet Archive and find the publication date on an old Amazon page. But for books that would be plausibly going out of the copyright in, oh, the next 50 years, it is typically easier to find the date of death. Even in the far-future case, I think there is much less likelihood of a date error in an obituary or (for Americans) on the public social security death master, than on an Amazon page, where a reprint date and original publication date can be confused or garbled.
However, the real reason I voted for Life + 50 is that it is still, by population under it, the most popular standard (yes, I know, Life + 70 is gaining ground). Books cross borders and I would like a uniform international marketplace, especially for eBooks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
The negative right is important as well the positive right. . . . That's part of the encouragement to create.
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I'm afraid I totally disagree. I can't think of any author I like to read who would want their work withheld from the public -- much less who wanted it at time of creation. Maybe there is some very rare example where the political views of the author changed. Or, maybe, the author's views didn't change, but the author is under government pressure to suppress his or her own work. Freedom to read is a much bigger value to me than the fact that an unfortunate author may wish to harm our freedom to read.