Quote:
Originally Posted by lkmiller
To clarify, definitely not advocating for the original copyright to be extended. But the authors' estate and/or a publisher need to make money or the work will go out of print. So piracy of dead authors is harmful too.
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No, unless the Estate self publishes and has the rights the Estate can do nothing.
The Publisher my have the rights and not reprint or do an ebook.
Or
If the Estate has the rights, no publisher might wish to publish, they could only self-publish.
Instead of copyright being extended, it should have remained at Life + 50 as it still is in some countries. Also any extension should only have applied to fresh deaths, not retroactively applied. That was corporate theft from the community.
I'd argue that even life + 50 years is too long. That's adult grandchildren. Should have been shortened to between 25 and 50 years. Virtually the entire benefit of copyright beyond 25 years is to already wealthy companies and corporations.
Also if a corporation own the rights of dead person they should be obliged to at least electronically publish or rights go to public domain if physical copies of the book, music, TV/Cinema, Play, Opera or painting etc can't be consumed by the public. Before electronic publishing the valid argument was the cost of print run, film print, vinyl/CD/Cassette/VHS/DVD duplication etc.
In the 1990s when streaming/IPTV, electronic format books and music was proposed the argument was the Internet sales would give the "long tail". It's patchy with books and less popular music and nearly non-existent with TV/Cinema. Stuff gets deleted from Netflix.