Petition to reduce US copyright to 28 years

[Kumabjorn]

His family did not write it. I assume he could buy life insurance like everyone else.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

If they are dead, what do they need money for?

To be incentivated to produce more colassics, what else?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

His family did not write it. I assume he could buy life insurance like everyone else.

He could do but (as has been discussed before ad nausiam) his royalty payments are an author's legacy to his heirs. In most jobs, you get paid while you're doing the work. An author works "for free", and gets paid once the work is complete

[MovieBird]

Originally Posted by HarryT

He could do but (as has been discussed before ad nausiam) his royalty payments are an author's legacy to his heirs. In most jobs, you get paid while you're doing the work. An author works "for free", and gets paid once the work is complete

You mean like a:

Cabinetmaker
Filmmaker
Potterymaker
Boatmaker

or really anybody that makes things, or consultants that generate reports based on expertise?

Yea, authors are special flowers unlike everybody else...

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by HarryT

He could do but (as has been discussed before ad nausiam) his royalty payments are an author's legacy to his heirs. In most jobs, you get paid while you're doing the work. An author works "for free", and gets paid once the work is complete

Some people deserve to have money due to their ancestry. Like it has been forever.

I liked it more when their title was like "count" or "marquis" rather than "the grand-grandson of Dan Brown", but we can't have everything, can we?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by MovieBird

You mean like a:

Cabinetmaker
Filmmaker
Potterymaker
Boatmaker

or really anybody that makes things, or consultants that generate reports based on expertise?

Yea, authors are special flowers unlike everybody else...

A filmmaker does indeed get paid in the form of royalties from his film, just like an author does.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Films are (almost always) made by corporations. If those corporations are not permitted to own the intellectual property that they create, what would be the incentive in making it?

Again, you're making a leap too forward for me and I can't follow...

A short copyright (or none at all) does not make someone disown IP. The author of a novel is still the owner of IP even if he puts it in PD.

And companies can make money (provided that money is the one and only incentive for every human activity) even without eternal copyright.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Format C:

And companies can make money (provided that money is the one and only incentive for every human activity) even without eternal copyright.

But can they make it with NO copyright, which is what kenny was proposing?

[Elfwreck]

Authors get the right to control copying and some use of their works, unlike cabinetmakers and potters, because society has a vested interest in getting authors' works widely available. Without the incentive of the weird monopoly that is copyright, there's no reason to distribute widely--just sell copies to as many people as the author can directly reach. Without copyright, the incentive runs to private galleries and pay-per-view approaches to all sorts of arts and creative works.

I *like* books being widely available by the thousands. I don't want authors to decide the only way to make money at their craft is to self-publish (really self publish, with their own printers) and host paid readings of their works which aren't allowed to leave their house, or have their words arranged as streaming video on paid-membership websites.

It's not that people who make shelves are less creative than authors and artists--a lot of precision work can go into a well-made basic shelf, and some artistic flair. But for the most part, society is not damaged by the gain or lack of any particular shelf, nor are we going to run out of shelves if someone stops making them because of lack of financial incentive. Books are much less fungible; we need a large variety of them to function, so we need a system that encourages *all* authors to distribute their works.

Copyright working after death encourages late-in-life works; without it, there's (1) no incentive to publish that final volume in the series if the author knows he'll be dying soon, and (2) substantial incentive to *lie* about the author of that final volume... if the author is dying of cancer, he can just allow his son--or his teenage granddaughter--to register the copyright. (He can do this now, too. But with copyright lasting some time after death, he doesn't have to choose between an accurate legacy and feeding his family.)

I'd love to see copyright return to a fixed time after publication; I'm not at all sure that's compatible with Berne. (I'd love to see Berne reworked and overturned, but that's even less likely.) However, I'd settle for the US sticking to the Berne *minimum,* and retroactively applying that--so that all movies and corporate creations from before 1961 jumped into the public domain, and other works were shifted to Life+50.

Open the floodgates of the public domain and find out how much creative and scientific work we can get done on the internet if everything before the 60's were freely available as source materials.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Format C:

The author of a novel is still the owner of IP even if he puts it in PD.

Umm...no, not at all. Unless you define your words like Humpty Dumpty.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But can they make it with NO copyright, which is what kenny was proposing?

But I wasn't proposing that. I'm saying that his family would still enjoy the fruits of his labor 28 year (or something along that line) instead of 50 or 70 years.
Nowadays the only ones who enjoy the "fruits" of their heritage is royalty. I don't think authors are royalty.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Open the floodgates of the public domain and find out how much creative and scientific work we can get done on the internet if everything before the 60's were freely available as source materials.

Most of what was done before the 60s is available to people who live pretty much anywhere except the US. "Life+70" countries are up to 1941; "Life+50" countries up to 1961.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But can they make it with NO copyright, which is what kenny was proposing?

I'm willing to bet that if copyright was suddenly canceled, they'd put their effort in that direction and they'll make it!

After all Wikipedia outperformed MS Encarta by several orders of magnitude...

[ApK]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Most of what was done before the 60s is available to people who live pretty much anywhere except the US. "Life+70" countries are up to 1941; "Life+50" countries up to 1961.

??? Most? Like everything from cave paintings onward? That's true for the US too, I'm sure, as 20 or 30 years hardly matters.

But if you mean stuff done RECENTLY before the 60s, I doubt it's true in life+anything places since many folks who produced IP in the recent past are still alive.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Format C:

I'm willing to bet that if copyright was suddenly canceled, they'd put their effort in that direction and they'll make it!

After all Wikipedia outperformed MS Encarta by several orders of magnitude...

True, but I'm not sure I see your point. The contents of Wikipedia are copyrighted, just as the contents of Encarta are. To quote from Wiki:

The text of Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)...