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Originally Posted by llreader
Interesting proposal, but I imagine the studios would mine the 30-year-old stuff for all it's worth, and then have a copyright for 30 years on the movie with no obligations to the author.
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Then they miss the opportunity to exploit new trends. Wait 30 years for Harry Potter movies? Not a chance; some movie company will pay for the right to make them now. However, we'd see a lot of small, indie movie production houses waiting for copyright to expire, and we'd get more movies made based on books from two generations ago, rather than just blockbuster movies based on bestsellers from the last 18 months.
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But I imagine they wouldn't consider it a good deal, because the price they pay for film rights is probably nothing compared to the "long tail" of endless copyrights (sorry, talking to myself here).
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Of course they wouldn't. They want copyright to last forever. They don't want the public--which includes their competitors--to have the right to make new works based on the old ones, or to freely share the ones that already exist.
What they consider a good deal is irrelevant; the purpose of copyright isn't "to allow creators & investors to make as much money as possible off a given work."