Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I think this is exactly right. And unfortunately, the politicians who ought to be working for the public good tend to be influenced by the people with money instead. And have been for at least a couple of hundred years.
Although I suppose some of them may just be honestly mistaken.
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To be fair, once you get past a certain number of years, it become difficult to show how extensions of copyright damage the public at large. What's the difference between the Berne Convention copyright (life plus 50 or 75 years for corporations) and the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (life plus 70, or 95 years for corporations)? From a movie point of view, if they hadn't extended copyright, any movie prior to 1945 would be in public domain, yet I can still go out and buy DVD of the most of the major movies for 1939 (Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach...). From that stand point, the public hasn't been seemingly harmed. In both music and movies, you really needed to original master to have a credible option of generating a copy to sell. It's only with DVD's that making quality copies is possible, and DVD's didn't come out until the mid 90's.
The major harm is more on the book side of things, since books are much easier to reproduce. I would tend to argue that the major harm of copyright in the past, from purely a book point of view, is that once a book goes out of print, and most books go out of print very quickly, you are reduced to either libraries or used book stores if you want to read it. Thus, they quickly are forgotten. But while a rich author drove the Berne Convention, books don't really drive copyright law anymore.
Most recognize the issue of orphaned works, and if books were not grouped together with movies and music, I suspect that the issue of orphaned works would have been fixed by now. The most recent attempt at addressing orphaned works in the US was in 2015, but for the most part, Congress simply doesn't have the will to pass anything simply because it's tied to movies and music.
Plus, from a pragmatic point of view, there simply isn't that many people interested in reading old books. In general, life plus 50 means that most books are long forgotten before they go into public domain. Life plus 70 doesn't significantly change the equation. Tolkien died in 1973. In a life plus 50 world, his works would go into PD is a few years. In a life plus 70, it's 20 more years. We don't have to worry about people forgetting Lord of the Rings. but who remembers what other books were published in 1954? Not many, I'll bet. That was before I was born, and I'm not young.
On the other hand, if the US was back in the 28 years plus 28 renewal, then any book written prior to 1963 would be in public domain and the vast majority of books written prior to 1992 would be in public domain. That changes the equation a lot. Those books are still in the public's mind. There are a number of books from the 80's and before that are still in the public's minds.
H. Warner Munn, author of Merlin's Ring (1974) , died in 1981. He is one that I point to when discussing the problem of orphaned works. By the time his works go into PD, odds are pretty much no one will care. On the flip side, one can likely find this on the dark net. I'm actually slightly surprised that it doesn't pop up on some of the ebook sites since it's pretty unlikely that whomever holds the copyright would issue a take down notice.