Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
This is still covered if the copyright is based on X years, with nothing to do with the life of the author. Whatever X is, whether or not the author dies has nothing to do with it. Publishers still have plenty of opportunity to make the work available and return a profit on it.
I don't think anybody has said that copyright should automatically end at death. But I don't believe it should automatically extend beyond death either. It should be for a fixed length, pure and simple.
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I don't think anyone has said that copyright should automatically end at death, but certainly it has been implied by these people who are asking why the estate of an author should benefit.
My one objection to a single fixed length is simple. Longer copyrights (Say anything longer than 20 years) tend to encourage authors whose works remain in print as steady sellers (i.e., the classic mid-list author), but which do not sell well enough that the author can live off the royalties of existing books alone. I.e., they are likely to take up writing as a full time profession. But those same extended periods of copyright essentially are too long for works that have little commercial value after the first few years of publication. Obviously a book about the impending economic collapse of 1995 is not likely to find any publisher in 2009; but for a variety of reasons, it might be of interest to researchers. Is it still going to be around to be scanned and added to an internet archive in 50 years?
Likewise it drives me nuts that DOS 1.0 is still under copyright 25 years after anyone has purchased a copy of it.
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Bill