Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Allowing heirs to control copyright is an incentive to publish late in life, or on one's deathbed. Otherwise, why bother publishing? You'll never see money from it; you won't get famous for it. Especially if what you've written is controversial--why inflict unpleasant attention on your family if they won't benefit from it?
Not everyone would be dissuaded from writing or publishing for those reasons, but enough would that it's worth allowing copyright to extend at least somewhat after death of the author. (Not to mention that, if "death of author/artist" is the absolute end, there's no incentive for families to publish works posthumously.)
Feh. Bring back 28 year copyrights with a single 28-year extension. Or something similar. Throw the Berne convention out; it's blocking progress and causing insane money to be spent on frivolous lawsuits.
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Ah, that is a fair point. Especially since a lot of great work in many areas has been done late in life. So I guess their needs to be some extension beyond the lifetime.
The 28 with extension idea sounds like a good one. But I wouldn't limit to one extension. If you publish a hit book at 20, extend at 28, you should be able to extend again at 56 if you're still alive etc.
So I'd say unlimited 28 year extensions during the person's life time, rather than doing 50 years or 75 years after death etc.
Then at most you've got 28 years after death if they die right after an extension, and many will be shorter as they die in the middle of an extension.
The 28 years is arbitrary as well, you could do something shorter like 15 and just require more frequent extensions--which would get stuff in the public domain much quicker after death of the content holder.