Eternal Copyright: a Modest Proposal

New submitter SpockLogic writes "The Telegraphs has a tongue in cheek essay in praise of eternal copyright by the founder of an online games company. Quoting: 'Imagine you're a new parent at 30 years old and you've just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the "public good," simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they'd just make it worse.'"

Comments

Another way of eternity

[Hentes]

Copyright technically won't be eternal, but its duration increases linearly over time in a way that it never ends.

Re:Another way of eternity

[maxwell demon]

No, it will definitely end. About 70 years after the last human died.

Micky Mouse Copyright

[wonderboss]

What we really need is a special copyright for Mickey and the rest of the Disney characters
so that The Walt Disney Company can stop lobbying to extend all copyrights.

Re:Micky Mouse Copyright

[VortexCortex]

What we really need is a special copyright for Mickey and the rest of the Disney characters...

It's called Trademark, and once Disney realised they could have just Trademarked the mouse instead, they laughed about how needless yet simple it was to crush out and poison the public domain from which Walt's famous works initially sprang.

Re:Micky Mouse Copyright

[_xeno_]

Though to be fair, after reading the John carter wikipedia page, it does appear that they actually purchased the rights to this one back in the early 80s.

I'm not clear on why, but I just realized that the author of the original books was Edgar Rice Burroughs, and - well, he created a company to manage licensing his works which apparently still sues people for using Tarzan. Trying to find more info on that discovered several articles about Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. suing comic book companies for using Tarzan and John Carter himself.

So presumably we're talking trademark rights, and not copyright rights, since the movie covers only public domain books. Which also demonstrates quite nicely how trademark can be used to extend copyright well beyond the death of the author, since Edgar Rice Burroughs died over 60 years ago. And it's being used to extract royalties for making a movie based on public domain works.

Probably. Who knows, except the lawyers who worked out whatever rights we're talking about.

So maybe this is Disney being hoist with their own petard?

There is to much abandonware as there is now

[Joe_Dragon]

There is to much abandonware as there is now and the last thing we need is longer copyrights that will let to most lost software / books / movies that should be in the open but can't be due to copyrights.

Re:There is to much abandonware as there is now

[Anonymous Coward]

"to much"?!?! Fuck you!

Comments as a derivative work.

[fish_in_the_c]

While considering this most modest proposal of 'eternal copy rite' I think we should also take pause to consider another terrible form of piracy so frequent today. That of creating a body of work, that's soul purpose is the critique of an existing piece of work. Obviously any monetary benefit derived from such a work , would not exist without the author of the original work. So much so that such works are derivative works par excellent of the original. Since the comments are bound to do nothing more then make the original less useful and worse then it's initially concise and proper format the author should retain control over Removing or modifying any comments not fully in the spirit of the original.

After all, all freedoms have limits , and freedom of speech certainly is of a lower value then an authors freedom to create wealth and provide a viable income to her/himself and future descendants.

Re:Please be satire

[Larryish]

You can call it what it really is:

No Child Permitted to Excel