Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Did not the public, who agreed to the deal in the first place, not get robbed of their garden? They still have to pay fees on something that should have become free, according to the original deal....
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Oh, sure. I don't think it should be legal to extend copyrights on existing works. (It probably shouldn't be legal to
reduce copyrights on existing works, either, at least not beyond what they were at the times the works were created.)
Your analogy extension raises the question of where the gardener built the garden. It would make sense for the garden to revert to public use if it had initially been built on public land, or if the gardener had been paid by the public to build it. If the garden was built on private land from the gardener's own resources, it seems less clear why anyone would have expected the garden to revert to public ownership.
So, examining this analogy again, when an author writes a story, are they writing it on "public land" or "private land"? I am inclined to say "public land," actually. No author writes in a vacuum. We build on existing experiences, including things we've read, seen, heard, many of which were creations of someone else. Our effort creates our particular work, but we perform that work in a kind of public space. I think we acknowledge that with our concept of "public domain."