Sherlock Holmes and the Copyright Tangle

spagiola passes along a New York Times piece on the copyright travails of Sherlock Holmes. "At his age [123 years], Holmes would logically seem to have entered the public domain. But not only is the character still under copyright in the United States, for nearly 80 years he has also been caught in a web of ownership issues so tangled that Professor Moriarty wouldn't have wished them upon him."

Comments

The copyright cash cow

[Brian Boitano]

Basically, nobody wants to give up rights to it because they can make money from it.

Re:The copyright cash cow

[timmarhy]

if you can milk something infinately, it removes all incentive to create new creative works, completely undermining the whole arguement for copyright in the first place. how does this simple fact fail with law makers?

Re:The copyright cash cow

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't fail with them. They just don't care. They get paid to write more long-lasting, restrictive copyright laws, so they do it. All those "for the good of culture" arguments are just smokes and mirrors, so it's less obvious.

Re:The copyright cash cow

[interkin3tic]

if you can milk something infinately, it removes all incentive to create new creative works, completely undermining the whole arguement for copyright in the first place.

I'd point out that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is also very dead, which probably prevents him from making new creative works more than a lack of financial incentive, but I agree with you in principle.

Re:The copyright cash cow

[Wildclaw]

Yup. In fact, copyright in itself is self defeating as any increase in actual information produced is offset by the loss of actual copies of said information due to higher copying costs.

To be fair, that is not 100% true. If the extra information produced is of higher quality it can still be worth it. But that is pretty much the only situation where copyright can be motivated. However, in that case, I don't really see any evidence for copyright beyond 5 years, as quality information should have no problem earning back its money in that amount of time. And allowing non-quality information to profit from copyright laws is inefficient.

Disney

[BlackHawk-666]

You can blame Disney and their rodent for the current state of copyright laws. Don't think that when copyright period for Mickey once again draws to a close there won't be a large bundle of cash handed out to the nearest person able to extend the period another 20-50 years.

Re:Disney

[sootman]

Which makes Disney the worst kind of hypocrite, since they've built their empire on public domain works, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940) to The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Rapunzel (later this year) and many others in between. Over 70 years of taking from the public domain and what have they given back? NOTHING. Fuckers.

What a crock

[davmoo]

The fact that none of the current living "heirs" is a direct descendant of the author is further proof of how screwed up our system is.

But I can understand why they fight so hard. If they didn't have Holmes, they'd have to all get real jobs and work for a living.

Re:What a crock

[LordLucless]

Huh? What's so special about an author, that they get life insurance for free? Everyone else has to pay for that sort of guarantee for our dependants. Copyright should be a fixed term, regardless of the mortal status of the author.

Re:What a crock

[h4rm0ny]

Huh? What's so special about an author, that they get life insurance for free? Everyone else has to pay for that sort of guarantee for our dependants.

You get paid in real time. Do a month's work, get a month's pay, set some aside for life insurance or pension. An author is more like a long-term investor. They put in a lot of work up front and their rewards come in over years, sometimes decades. If you write a novel, die, and then a year later it gets its second larger print run after good reviews / word of mouth, or it gets bought for turning into a film, or whatever, your widow would get nothing to represent the value of the work. That's why copyright projects forwards in time, because the earnings project forward in time. What, if your partner invests all their hours and money into long-term stocks, you don't get the earnings back from that because they died?

Also, it reduces the incentive for movie producers to kill you so they can use your work for free. ;)

Time to revert back to the 1790-1922 laws

[mykos]

If IP owners are going to be such absolute children about this, maybe we should revert back to the old law.

It was once legally agreed upon that 14+14 years was an adequate amount of time to commercially exploit your copyright. With today's digital distribution and rapid-fire publishing houses, does it really need to be a HUNDRED years?

Re:where does the 2023 date come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

120 years.

One. Hundred. And. Twenty. Fucking. Years.

That's just obscene.

Re:Think like a politician

[El_Muerte_TDS]

If copyright is extended jobs are lost. You don't need to hire people to create new stuff because you can still earn money from the ancient stuff.

Re:Think like a politician

[shutdown -p now]

If you extend copyright: Some number of jobs (thousands, tens of thousands?) saved.

What jobs? Once the work is created, the author, strictly speaking, doesn't have a job, unless he starts working on a new one.

Or did you mean lawyers and accountants?

Re:i don't understand

[JAlexoi]

Or stay the fuck away from the US market. I pray to god, for you guys to have a revolution, since you are being fucked over by all of that "new royalty".

Copyright laws are theft of culture.

[Greymoon]

Copyrights are granted as a contract between society and the creator. Society grants protection for an artist's work for a brief time, in return society becomes the benefactor of these works once copyrights elapse. Failure to release works to public domain and instituting new copyright laws to lengthen copyright duration violate this contract, in effect theft of culture. Copyrights - 7 years. Patents - 10 years. Anything more is stealing your culture.

Re:where does the 2023 date come from?

[icebraining]

Yes, poor Conan Doyle. If we don't extend the copyright even further, he could die from starvation! Oh, wait...