Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
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."
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We're a bit at cross-purposes. In the garden analogy, the ownership of the "value added" of the garden was granted by the public for a defined period. No one was coerced to create the garden, and all parties were informed about the terms and conditions for said garden creation. The creator did so with open eyes and full knowledge of the limited nature of the garden ownership.
But when one side or the other suddenly decide to abrogate the terms and conditions, well after the fact, is not the the party (whichever one that is losing value) being robbed?
If so, does this not reduce the "ethical standing" of those doing the robbing?