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All Copyrighted Works First Published In the US In 1923 Will Enter Public Domain On January 1st (smithsonianmag.com)
"At midnight on New Year's Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain," reports Smithsonian Magazine. "It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S.
"After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit 'Yes! We Have No Bananas,' any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt's stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill's The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations." From the report: "The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we're reaching the 20-year thaw," says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one -- in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond -- predated Google. "We have shortchanged a generation," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. "The 20th century is largely missing from the internet."
We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author's works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years. Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse's first appearance on screen, in 1928, was set to enter the public domain in 2004. At the urging of Disney and others, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named for the late singer, songwriter and California representative, adding 20 years to the copyright term. Mickey would be protected until 2024 -- and no copyrighted work would enter the public domain again until 2019, creating a bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and those from 1923.
"After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit 'Yes! We Have No Bananas,' any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt's stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill's The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations." From the report: "The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we're reaching the 20-year thaw," says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one -- in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond -- predated Google. "We have shortchanged a generation," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. "The 20th century is largely missing from the internet."
We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author's works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years. Steamboat Willie, featuring Mickey Mouse's first appearance on screen, in 1928, was set to enter the public domain in 2004. At the urging of Disney and others, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, named for the late singer, songwriter and California representative, adding 20 years to the copyright term. Mickey would be protected until 2024 -- and no copyrighted work would enter the public domain again until 2019, creating a bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and those from 1923.
The important thing to remember is that Disney already has a trademark on Mickey, and that will never expire. So it still stops people from producing new works with Mickey in them even if Steamboat Willie goes into the public domain. Haivng Steamboat Willie in the public domain only allows us to make copies of the original without getting autorization from Disney.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
While I agree that copyrights should not be eternal, your justification for why it's wrong is flawed and a slippery slope unless you think we should get rid of inheritances all together.
Inheritance isn't even close to the same thing. As a scarce resource, for an inheritance to bring you any benefit you have to choose to either spend it or invest it. To the extent that you spend it, it isn't eternal—you're using it up. On the other hand, if you invest it then any returns you receive are the product of that investment, which is your own new contribution. Just stuffing your inheritance in a mattress and sitting on it won't do you any good in the current inflationary economy, despite the fact that even that would benefit others indirectly since you are choosing not to bid up prices for goods they want to buy.
Copyright by contrast isn't a scarce material good and can't be "used up" no matter how many copies are made. The copyright holder's revenue is derived purely from artificial restrictions which copyright law places on others to prevent them from providing themselves with new copies of existing works, which they could otherwise do on their own without any cost to the creator or copyright holder.
If a creator wants to save what they've earned from their labor of creating and publishing new works and eventually give those savings as a gift to their children (or anyone else), there is no problem with that. Anyone who receives income is free to make that choice. The issue here is not the ongoing benefit to copyright holders but rather the ongoing burden which copyright imposes on the rest of society.
Frankly, if you're going to attack people for copying something you created then I believe we'd all be better off if you just kept it to yourself, or at least only shared it with people who explicitly opted in to your terms (with recourse limited to those who actually agreed to the terms if they should happen to be broken, as with any other contract). The concept that you would be permitted to impose restrictions on everyone else through a unilateral act of publication is insane.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The original copyright law was 14 years with the possibility of a 14 year extension if you made the effort along with a 35 year grandfather clause with the reasoning that it was to promote learning. The Americans copied that into their Constitution with limited time and for the advancement off the arts and sciences, which pretty well covered learning at the time and the first American law was also 14+14.
The real problem was that the publishers of the day, the stationers, managed to come up with this protecting the artist argument when it was always about protecting the publishers, who usually paid a pittance to the artist for unlimited rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism