Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
Copyright should be long enough to give the average work a chance to make a reasonable profit for the artist. No more, no less. That's what will give artists incentive to continue to create. Any copyright terms based on the life of the artist have nothing to do with the original intent of copyright.
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While I generally agree that Life + 70 is a little too long, I don't see a problem with the basic Life + formula. Nor do I see any requirement to
limit copyright exclusively to "incentive to create." There is nothing wrong or illegal about Congress expanding copyright to include, for example, a more basic realm of "protecting commercial interests."
For example, an artist like Michael Jackson -- no matter what your opinion of his work or his person happens to be -- poured significant funds into producing a series of recordings that were not released during his lifetime. Does it make sense that upon the instant of his death that all of his copyrights, including the ones for as-yet unreleased recordings, should instantly go into the public domain because you can't "incentivize the dead?" Should his estate be stuck with massive debts and no viable way to recoup those debts?
Similarly, should we just abolish the concept of a "literary executor?" Should every scrap of paper that Nabokov ever wrote on be declared PD at the instant of his death? Should Salinger's estate be forced to publicly release anything Salinger wrote, in spite of any written instructions in his will or to his executor(s)? What if the artist explicitly instructs a literary executor to put his archives and unpublished writings into the hands of an institution that is capable of maintaining the writings -- does that somehow run afoul of the idea of putting works into PD?
(Granted there are problems with this approach; e.g. the Kerouak estate is tangled up in all sorts of legal wrangling, which is preventing scholars access to his archives and papers. However, throwing open the floodgates doesn't quite seem beneficial either.)
Or... What constitutes a "reasonable profit" and a "reasonable time frame?" 70 years? 50 years? 25 years? What's the criteria, and from whence is the time frame derived? Or should we pick a profit amount, and declare that the instant the work achieves a certain amount of profit, it goes into PD...?
Life + 70 may be too long. However, the idea of guaranteeing copyright for the creator's lifetime, plus at least some additional time, certainly makes sense to me.