Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Here is an example. Ernest Hemmingway wrote all of his works under the 1909 copyright act, which granted a copyright for a maximum of 56 years. Under those rules, everything he wrote up to 1953 ought to be in the public domain. Everything everybody in the US wrote should be in the public domain up to 1953. But are they? No Way! Because the copyright agreement has been unilateraly stretched in favor of copyright holders! That's a land grab. Every buck gathered by the owners of those pre-1953 copyrights is a buck wrongfully taken out of the public's pockets. Those works were willingly made under the 1909 laws, nobody was cheated. So why should the heirs and assigns keep getting more and more money, and control access to, these older works? It's not the authors, in most cases, they're dead. And Dead men don't create. No, it's just a land grab for the heirs and assigns, driven by corporations that never die, and who expect their copyrights to have the same benefit....
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I don't disagree with that, but you need to put the blame where it belongs. it's not with the authors, it's with the government and the corporations. And we need at least to work to see the
Public Domain Enhancement Act passed. It's also not a justification, as some seem to see it, to pirate the work of authors trying to make a living.