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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.'"
You call it sarcasm, they call it talking points. Stop giving them ideas, asshole!!
Copyright technically won't be eternal, but its duration increases linearly over time in a way that it never ends.
Oh please let this be satire and not something serious
I kept waiting for the baby eating, but it never happened.
. .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_bono
Palm trees and 8
Clearly you didn't read it, or you can't read.
Since it had such a jab...
Socialist! Is a man not entitled to the sweat from his great-great-great-grandfather's brow?!
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.
more cowbell
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.
I'm all for eternal copyright. However, after a certain amount of time (say 20-30 years or so), you would have to start paying a fee to the government to maintain your copyright. This fee would increase at an exponential rate for every year after that. This way companies that have a valuable copyrights could hold on to it for at least some time, but the vast majority of creative works would be converted to public domain within a reasonable time frame.
(I also think patents could work similarly, except that the exponential fees would start at say 3-5 years and with a fixed timelimit of 20 years after which the patent will expire.)
Sheldon, mathematical liberties are allowed when used in hyperbole.
And I really hope so. Otherwise, I will have to accept that there are people who truly believe that:
"it will be difficult to enforce due to the inherently criminal nature of digital technology"
I didn't know it was inherently criminal until few minutes ago. Someone please save me.
Its hard not to comment on the entire , prevalent these days, rent seeking behavior from some distant heirs. I do not five a flying rat's ass about descendants of Jane. She wrote the classic. Not the heirs. What did they do exactly?
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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.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The first archeologist to discover the copyrighted works of humanity will be summarily executed by Automated Copyright Enforcement Mechanism.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
I've got my own modest proposal;
If you wish for your creation to provide for your offspring to the fourth and beyond generation, establish a trust or foundation to accept the proceeds from the sale and use of your creation, invest it as necessary to preserve the contributions and what interest is not too risky, and hope that it does indeed provide enough income to fund this before a reasonable copyright runs out.
Because, it seems to me, the past function of copyright is to protect the interests of the creator, the author, inventor, what have you. NOT their children's children's children's children's.
Perpetual copyright is the equivalent of perpetual patent. At what point are we no longer protecting the original holder, and are perpetuating a stream of income forever to those whose only interest is in being born of someone born of someone born of someone who was born of the instigator of the whole darned thing?
And if the initial proposal is acceptable, to perpetuate copyright forever, then clearly it must be assignable, so that one could even grant it in perpetuity to a mere friend. Or their dog. And their offspring. In perpetuity.
Time to really consider what copyright should be. Notice there are no corporations out there with perpetual licenses to prosper? They have to provide value to survive, even if that value is only to their shareholders or management and employees. So what of value does perpetual copyright provide to anyone other than the spawn of the initial holder?
I know. Money. Wrong answer. I pay copyright holders liberally for their work. When they are long gone, I just can't summon up a reason to do so.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I don't see anything in there about "Transfer" of copyright. I read it as ONLY the author can benefit from it.