Yes, but a great deal of art created under such systems were propaganda made for the benefit of patrons, which is not in the public's interest either.
Well, that still happens today. And at any rate, it doesn't really matter. Copyright is concerned quantity, not quality. You don't want the government making decisions as to which pieces of art should get the most protection. Whether you see high art or low art, it should be the public that decides, and this is basically a matter of where money gets spent. (And of course, one man's high art is another's low art, and there are shifts over time)
The best thing that happened to art was when it was turned into a viable career for anyone to pursue.
When did that happen? Most art is economically worthless; most artists can't treat art as a viable career. The stereotype of the starving artist exists for a reason.
That's not culture, though, that's the pocketbooks of consumers.
What's the difference? You can't make significant objective statements about culture. Certainly the government shouldn't try. But if you can get anything you want for free, however, then at least you can get access to as much of whatever you like; if it cost money, you'd have to prioritize. This lets individuals make their own decisions as to culture.
I want apples to be free, but I can't go into someone's farm and pick a bunch and go sell them at half the going rate because it benefits society. I agree it would be GREAT if that's how the world worked, but it doesn't and all it accomplishes is putting an apple farmer into the poorhouse.
Ever watch Star Trek? They have those replicators that can make apples by rearranging tanks of various raw materials. If we had those starting today, apple farmers would indeed go out of business; why pay them to grow an apple, when you can just get perfect apples, every time, at the push of a button? Putting them out of work, while in the process solving world hunger, seems like a good plan to me.
Creative works are like this now. They're non-rivalrous, meaning that we can reproduce them forever, and no one loses anything. The materials we fix the works into might have some cost associated with them, but it's often pretty minimal (just as the replicators technically need a power source and raw materials, though they can recycle the latter).
Jefferson drew a comparison with fire. If only one person has fire, he can charge people to use it. But everyone can light a taper from his fire, and get their own fire, without diminishing his. This puts the first guy out of business, but now the whole world has illumination.
Copyright isn't intended to help artists. It's intended to get them to create new works (by giving them the incentive of a monopoly) but to also get those works in the public domain as fast as possible, for it is in the public domain that the works can do the most good.
If we gave artists too much of a monopoly, it would directly prevent the works from being in the public domain as fast as possible. If we didn't give them a monopoly, or enough of one, not as many works would be created within the timeframe that is acceptable to us for getting works into the public domain.
But no matter what, we're always looking at the public interest. Whether there are many successful artists or just a few doesn't really matter much. The public wants art, not artists.
This is where copyright went all wrong. If I write a book about "Bob", I don't see why you couldn't write a story about him too. In fact, I would hope you WOULD. I would hope we could work together to make Bob a better-developed cultural fixture, without worrying about licensing and other silliness. On the other hand, I don't want you to take my book and sell it word-for-word without paying me anything. The two do not need to be tied together (though they currently are, in today's world).
What happened was that people started making translations of Uncle Tom's C
Which is where the balance is: if the public's interest is in watching another season of "Lost", and the only way it can be produced is if all the people working on the show can earn enough to survive, and the only way that can happen is if copyright exists to defend the creators long enough to make money from the show... then it is in the public's interest to keep Company B from copying an episode off the web and selling it on the street corner for $3 ahead of the DVD box set hitting stores.
No, the public wants several things: They do want to watch Lost. They also want to watch any versions or sequels of Lost that anyone creates. And they also want to get it for free, and for it to be in the public domain. And these interests are equal.
The balance is in how to get as much of this as possible, since it's pretty unlikely that they can get it all. (Though that would be ideal)
Given that what we're really talking about are works generally, and not any specific work, it might be that the way to get the most original works, the most derivative works, and to have the least amount of copyright (in terms of scope and time) will support many works, but not Lost in specific.
Certainly we don't have the kind of copyright laws that could make it economically possible for me to rearrange the stars into exciting new constellations. And no one cares, since it would be art that comes at too high a cost. High budget TV shows might also turn out not to be viable when copyright laws are optimized. That's unfortunate, but not a really bad thing.
The public's right isn't nearly as clear-cut as you're making it out to be.
Yes it is.
Without protection from COMMERCIAL piracy, artists can't afford to create, and there is very little art made, and culture suffers (except in very odd, isolated cases)
No, some artists can't afford to create. Others can. There is always some creation going on regardless of competition. Hell, the idea of copyright didn't even exist anywhere until 1710 -- but there's a lot of art that was created before then.
Besides, copyright harms culture too, by preventing people from getting copies for the lowest possible price (or free), by preventing people from creating derivatives without authorization, by impairing the preservation of works since people can't make and disseminate copies, etc.
Again, the trick is to find the solution that is best for culture. What's best for authors is by no means what's best for culture.
It all depends on who's copying the book and for what purpose.
No, having competition for making copies is always good for the public. It lowers prices, where the copies are identical, and allows different publishers to target different parts of the population. There's no natural monopoly argument in copyright.
It's just that it's difficult to have this in combination with very high levels of creation of original works. But ideally, we'd have both.
Certainly I cannot think of a situation where, if it would not affect creation of original works, it would be good to artificially restrict the freedom of the press with regards to creative works. Care to name one?
(n.b. we're not talking about things like libel, obsecenity, etc. which apply even to the original authors of such materials, regardless of copyright)
Copyrighted works are basically commodities; there's not a significant difference between a DVD made in some factory with the authorization of a studio, and a DVD made in the same factory, without that authorization.
This assumes that the people that made the content on the DVD are being compensated in both cases.
No. I'm saying that when a publisher does not have to pay the author, publishing that work is a lot cheaper. These savings can be passed on to the public.
For example, I can download the complete works of Shakespeare from all over the place on the Internet for free. I c
It's a balance thing, though, and I think you're focusing too much on the public's rights here (which given what you're replying to is very understandable).
No, the only interests here are those of the public. The balance is merely in figuring out how to best serve the public. Whether this makes artists happy or not is quite unimportant, save for how that factors into the public interest.
The purpose of copyright, from my understanding, is to keep Company B from taking my idea and turning it into a series of books and selling them all over the world, and not paying me a cent.
Your understanding is wrong then.
The purpose of copyright is to benefit the public. It doesn't protect ideas, by the way (see the statute to this effect at 17 USC 102(b) and also note that the constitution would prohibit such a thing).
Having people reprint books is actually good for the public. Copyrighted works are basically commodities; there's not a significant difference between a DVD made in some factory with the authorization of a studio, and a DVD made in the same factory, without that authorization. But if everyone can make copies, there is competition, and this produces desirable efficiencies and low costs of copies.
So there needs to be a very good reason why we would want to grant a monopoly which impedes this. That reason is that we need the work to be created before we can put it in the public domain. We still want both, of course, so we balance how much copyright to grant (purely so as to spur creation) and how much we don't grant, and how rapidly the copyright expires (so that the work is as unencumbered as possible and we can enjoy that competition asap).
But we don't care about artists for their own sake. Why should we? Why should the public at large have to suffer, just to prop up some artist? If the public ultimately benefits, then that's a good reason. But just as artists say that they don't want to take a loss, neither should the public have to take a loss.
The missing piece of this puzzle is how you compensate creatives who put themselves on the line for the enjoyment of others.
We don't, quite so much. At most, artists merely have an opportunity. Most artists would be financially better off working 9 to 5 jobs. They don't get compensated at all usually (with regards to their copyrights) or in rare cases, just a little bit. Being an artist and hitting it big is on par with winning the lottery.
The advent of digital media
I hate it when people say this. Books are digital media (unless you've noticed a continuous spectrum of letters between A and B). You mean something more like machine readable media.
The thing is that the public needs to realize that creatives need money to survive, too.
Which is why they get, at most, a chance to get money. Actual money depends on whether they do well in the market. And the size of the chance is limited by what's in the public's best interest. It is acceptable for some artists to decide not to create stuff, if the public benefit is more satisfied without them than with them.
If you had a reasonable avenue to compensate the cast and crew of "Lost" for every.avi you downloaded, would you? Ads? Subscription? Do you have a fundamental issue with that, or is it just that no one made it viable?
If I didn't have to? No.
This might result in the show no longer getting made. That's fine with me, so long as I'm ultimately better off. Some things come at too high a cost, after all. That might be one of them.
the public and the creators have to dial down the rhetoric and talk about how the system can work for everyone.
Working for the public is, by definition, working for everyone. Artists get to enjoy other artists' works on the same basis as everyone else. Maybe even a better one, if they can create unauthorized derivatives, which reduces their costs of creating works.
But special breaks for artists, at the detriment of the public? I don't think so.
Before the Betamax case, who could tell whether a VCR was legal? It was completely undeterminable and took a 5-4 decision in the Supreme court to settle.
Not to mention that the Supreme Court was initially going to hold against Sony, and only eventually decided to hold in their favor.
Yes -- fair use is extremely nebulous. That's a good thing, actually, as it allows it to cover unforeseen circumstances. But it would be good to have some additional exceptions as well, which would apply regardless of fairness.
Yes, you can be sued as a contributory and/or vicarious infringer, depending on what you've been doing.
See, for example, Napster, which wasn't sued for downloading, and wasn't sued for uploading, but was sued for providing assistance to other people who were.
TV shows are copyrighted, but is their distribution illegal?
Let's see:
Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner as provided by sections 106 through 122... is an infringer of the copyright.
17 USC 501(a)
So let's see section 106:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.
17 USC 106
So yeah -- unless there's some applicable exception here (I wouldn't bet on it) -- it's illegal.
I would see it differently. Extending copyright encourages creativity because it shows that if you can come up with good original concept that catches the popular imagination you can make an absolute mint off it. If that does not encourage people to create, or investors to back creative people nothing will.
Well, Disney began at a time when terms, among other things, were much less than they were now. Clearly he didn't need additional encouragement later, so why should there be a retroactive copyright for his work, especially long after he's dead?
But this really ignores the main issue: we don't want to encourage creativity too much. What we want is to best serve the public interest. But the public has several, equal interests. First, they want original works created. Second, they want derivative works created. Third, they want works to be unencumbered -- this means free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Without copyright, we have fully satisfied the third, somewhat satisfied the second, and slightly satisfied the first. We can sum this up and determine the net satisfaction of the public interest.
If we then offered a copyright of, say, 5 years, we'd reduce the immediate satisfaction of the third and second, but hopefully increase satisfaction of the first by a greater amount, and also some satisfaction of the second. We can sum these up too, and see if the net satisfaction is greater or lower than in other scenarios.
What we want is to find the scenario that involves the least restrictive laws and the greatest satisfaction of public interest. This will almost certainly not be the point at which we maximize the first interest -- which is what you were talking about -- because there are other interests at issue as well. (And plus copyright holders don't like competition, so they're known to use their rights as a sword, rather than a shield, and claim infringement to keep up-and-coming artists out of the marketplace; maximum creation of original works is thus probably impossible)
Given that most artists will never see economic value from their copyrights at all, and yet are encouraged to create, and given that in the rare cases that they do, this is almost always realized immediately (the vast majority of revenue for any medium is made when a work is first released in that medium, and dies off days-months afterwards), I think that we could still get the vast majority of creation we see now -- maybe more -- even if copyright terms were extremely short. And we'd all be better off too, since this would encourage more work in derivatives, and more freedom with regards to created works.
Preventing people from rehashing old ideas from the 30's and 40's is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is actually, all else being equal. A lot of the best work is derivative, where people spend more time on polish than the underlying concept. For example Shakespeare's plays were virtually all either based on history, or earlier plays and stories which he made new versions of. He was not a big original thinker. That shouldn't be held against him -- he was good.
I think what it boils down to, is that it is perfectly legal to download one copy of a show, but it is illegal to distribute.
Nope. Every time you have a purported fair use, you run through the analysis again. There's no sort of numerical limit involved, nor a hard rule against any kind of infringement rather than any other.
MPAA, like RIAA, has just been going after people that are easy for it to find, and who are further up the chain.
I.e. getting rid of P2P networks (as they tried in Napster and are trying in Grokster) prevents or impairs lots of people downstream from sharing since they can't use that network any more. Getting rid of trackers affects lots of people further down as well. Getting rid of uploaders at least affects some downloaders and leechers. Getting rid of downloaders doesn't really have affects on others at all. It's a simple 'attack the head of the snake' principle.
Fair use allows any otherwise infringing activity, so long as it is fair. It's just that it's probably easier to successfully argue that reproduction is fair than that distribution is fair, given the circumstances involved.
You can see what's infringing at 17 USC 106, and how to determine whether there is a fair use by using the four listed factors at 17 USC 107.
created by the government which, by their nature was funded by taxpayer dollars, was immediately public domain
This isn't correct. Only US government works are uncopyrightable, and that's due to a statute saying so. State works are copyrightable, and frequently are copyrighted. Due process may prevent states from using copyright to impede public access to laws, but that's not the whole of their output. Plus, even the federal government can fund projects by others, which are still copyrighted by the person who did the work at taxpayer expense.
Still, it would be nice for one reform in copyright law to be making works created by or at government expense public domain works. The public shouldn't have to pay twice.
The volume of PD titles on CSS-encrypted DVDs should not matter. There should need be only one to have a standing case.
Setting aside certain issues regarding what standing means, and what you'd actually need to have it, I didn't say that the point couldn't be raised in a case. In fact, it has been, several times, IIRC. It just isn't likely to work until there are a lot of public domain works on DVD, or whatever.
Does this mean that its settled and back to congress, or will the Supremes have to hear and rule too before the setaside is final?
If the FCC petitions the Supreme Court for cert., and Supreme Court decides to hear the case (which is totally up to them), then the case isn't over. But this doesn't prevent Congress from acting in the meantime to clarify the law, even were the Supreme Court to reverse the DC Circuit.
If only that were true. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent access controls protecting a copyrighted work, and forbids the distribution of tools to do so. So, even if a Mickey Mouse DVD one day falls into the public domain, all Disney need to do is release a new movie with the same 'access controls' and no one can traffic in the circumvention tool that would let them play the public domain DVD either.
This is why it is technically true, but not practically true. But as I said, numbers might be convincing.
So yes, the DMCA does effectively give perpetual copyrights.
Well, perpetual anti-circumvention rights anyway. This is part of the problem -- they're technically not copyrights. In fact, there's even dispute as to whether it's constitutional for Congress to do this, given the contours of the copyright power.
The one that set aside the broadcast flag, based on the lack of congressionally given authority on the part of the FCC to issue such a rule.
The Supreme Court did no such thing. They haven't even heard the case.
The court that did that was the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Basically, you see, there are three levels of federal Art. III courts in the US: District Courts, which are trial-level courts in which cases are first heard; Circuit Courts, which are the courts to which one appeals if unsuccessful at trial; and the Supreme Court, which may hear appellate-level cases if it chooses, and to which one petitions if unsuccessful previously (almost always at the Circuit level).
I'm sure the 12 judges on the DC Circuit are very smart, and certainly it's such an eminent court that it's often viewed as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court (e.g. Justices Ginsburg, Scalia, and Thomas are all former DC Cir. judges), but any of them would tell you that it's not the Supreme Court.
That's not technically true, just practically true.
1201 et seq only apply to works protected under Title 17. Once a work hits the public domain, it's okay to circumvent with regards to it.
However, when this argument was tried with regards to DeCSS in conjunction with CSS-encrypted public domain movies on DVD, it flopped, since the courts that looked at the issue didn't think that this was a real impediment to getting those works generally, and that it would make these provisions pretty useless if that argument were accepted.
Once most movies on DVD are in the public domain, something currently scheduled for the mid to late 21st century, perhaps it will find a more receptive audience. Personally I'd like to think we'll come to our senses and get rid of the DMCA and generally fix copyright law, long before then.
As far as classical copyright goes, I'd say its overall effect was to limit its scope very slightly.
The WIPO and Design portions of the act do increase the rights of artists, but are probably more accurately described as being paracopyright provisions, rather than real copyright provisions.
First, the DMCA doesn't extend copyright terms. You're thinking of the Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Sonny Bono Act. They're different things.
Second, the DMCA was passed in 1998. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled -- just as the lower courts that had heard the issue had -- that Congress could retroactively extend copyrights. (No one has AFAIK challenged prospective extensions) That case, Eldred, hadn't been a factor leading up to the DMCA or the CTEA.
So you might want to know what the hell you're talking about before you post the next time.
I don't believe you're correct with your statements about overnight success in the creative field being common. Frankly I believe it's not. Unless you're consdering 5+ years overnight success. I believe that the majority of authors (and musos) plug away for years basically on stuff that just "pays the bills". A single work may become a bestseller, but many authors/musos will have a considerable back catalog built up by then. So you can hardly call that overnight success.
That's not what I'm calling overnight success.
What I'm saying is that first, success of any amount is rare. Second, that for any particular work, if it will be a successful work, this will usually become evident rapidly. The same is not true for authors.
That is to say, the 20th novel, if it is a hit, will be a hit right within the first little while after it is on shelves. That's not true for the author; just each of his works. And again, most authors start out obscure and stay that way, and never succeed. Most of their works are obscure, and never succeed. Think about how many rejections are sent out in proportion to acceptances, and how few accepted, published books are hits. Success is rare, but on the few instances it is encountered -- with regards to works -- it is rapid.
If you go back to my example since copyright has expired on the previous books and they've moved into the public domain the author who has "just got by" for the last 20 years misses out when those books finally start reaping big rewards.
But it's unlikely that those old books will be bestsellers. His latest book is, in your example, but that only gets people interested in it. His back catalog may not hold the same appeal (for example, maybe the recent book is quite different from his older ones, or at least reflects a more mature author), and certainly doesn't have the buzz the latest book has. What he ought to do is capitalize on his success by writing more books. Not so much trying to get people to buy what they wouldn't buy before.
As for the copyright as a spur comment. If the author is getting bugger all on those first books there is an increased chance they will give up at some point. Cave in to the pressures of paying bills and stop creating because they can't see a reward.
Well, given that most authors fail to get rich, it's a good thing that they're basically optimists, write as their day job, or write for reasons other than money.
But like I said, even if you do strike it rich, the back catalog is unlikely to do much. Losing the oldest parts of it (though n.b. that I propose copyrights that max out at 25 years, so there'd still be a good chance that his works would be protected for a while, all being of differing ages, unless he had given up on them and stopped renewing the copyright) isn't likely to have a great impact.
The fact that he has a history of 0 successes and 19 failures is what'll do him in. He has no reason to believe that number 20 will be different. Whether he has the rights to his old works or not doesn't factor into that.
Regarding the licensing/copyright with employees and companies. I still don't see that it's a bad situation. For one thing if it's legislated there can be rules on how the contracts are structured. For example, they could rule that a creator is entitled to a certain percentage of the profit as well as a salary. Or that after x number of years the license is no longer exclusive and the copyright owner gains the right to license it to other companies. It also means if a company goes belly up there is no confusion over who owns the copyright. Similarly, if the legislation were written right licenses would be non transferrable. So IBM couldn't sell the license to Microsoft. It'd rely on the creators consent to sell the license.
And considering most of us already sign some form of contract when we get a job I don't see it as being a huge additional expense. The vast majority of jobs would have very simple contracts with stan
Huh? Since when do you pay "rent" when you buy a book or a CD? You buy it, you own it.
Rent-seeking is when you try to get value out of others without giving them anything in return. It's common with regards to monopolies, since a monopoly can charge above market prices without materially losing business. Copyrights are a monopoly since they allow copyright holders to charge more for copies of a work (for example) than you'd pay if there were no copyright.
Copyright holders generally view anything that touches on their work as being infringing, even if it's not. It's not enough for them to have a monopoly on the work within the bounds of copyright, but they try to expand those bounds as widely as possible as well. This is a form of rent-seeking behavior since they're trying to get rights beyond what what might have properly been granted to them to begin with.
the work itself
The work itself can't be taken; it can't be owned. Works are not the same thing as copyrights pertaining to those works, or copies, which are tangible objects in which the works are fixed.
At any rate, if the work is published, then it's out there.
the ability to charge a fair (or inflated) price for that work
That ability stems from copyright. If no copyright is granted, then there is no ability to be taken. (However, an author can still charge people just to initially publish his work, but copyright or a lack of copyright doesn't matter for that)
For example, until recently, architectural works weren't copyrightable. No one considered that to be a taking of anything however. Copyrights are artificial -- they don't exist until granted. Your argument is similar to saying that when people don't have sex, they're killing the children that they might have otherwise had.
Remember that those who say "no copyrights" are doing so in an environment where copyright does exist, so that change is, itself, an attempt at taking
But not as to future copyrights, like I said, since they don't exist yet.
Depends on how long you take to create the work, and how high you define "high" to be. Being able to feed one's family on the profits isn't considered "high" by many people.
The trick is opportunity costs.
Let's say that you are a writer. If you write a novel, it will take one year of writing, and the labor involved will prevent you from working at a job. We'll say that if the novel is a success, that the present value of all the money you'd make from it is $100,000, which is actually high. But the odds of success are 0.01% -- most manuscripts are rejected after all, most that are published don't sell well, etc., and this reflects the rarity of such success.
This means that we can assign a value to book writing of $10, i.e. 0.01% of $100,000.
If you didn't write the novel, you could've worked at a job and earned the present value of $30,000. The odds of getting a job that pays that much are probably rather higher, let's call it 30% just to pick something. After all, most people have a job (How many people do you personally know with a job? How many people do you personally know who are novelists earling $100k/book? There's a reason why one is rarer than the other.) and this pay isn't anything amazing.
This means we can assign a value to working a job of $9,000, i.e. 30% of $30,000.
If you want to provide for your family, you will work at the job. It pays better, all things considered.
(This is a simplified example, but you get the idea)
Publishers make the odds work a little bit more in their favor (though not perfectly -- most published works don't turn a profit or not a substantial one) by screening out works that they think will flop, by investing in marketing, etc. They put in money up front -- more money than the author essentially lost by writing in the first place. Usually they lose it, because most works flop
Lots of people don't understand lots of things. Nevertheless, it's a central part of the policy.
This is why the first copyright law speaks of it being an act to encourage learning, why the Constitution speaks of the purpose of copyright being to promote the progress of science, why we see Jefferson saying that (in reference to patents, but the argument is the same):
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not.
and why we see the courts frequently discuss the policy for having copyrights.
Plus of course, the rampant piracy we're seeing these days indicates that the public only believes in copyright up to a point. That point, I suspect, is commercial infringement. If they believed copyright law as it exists now were proper, they probably wouldn't violate it all the time.
Me, I'm all for copyright -- when it serves the public interest. And against it if it is harmful to the public. This isn't a very difficult position to adopt, but does require a little bit of looking beyond one's own nose.
I can't imagine that A.A. Milne would have been very enthusiastic if he'd known that Winnie the Pooh was going to be buggered for decades by the Disney Corp.
No worries there, then. Milne wrote the first Pooh book in 1926, and sold off the merchandising rights quite rapidly. The big to-do of late was between Disney and the widow of the man Milne sold his rights to -- so he evidently didn't care about the long term profits from other uses of the characters.
'Course, with a 25 year copyright, it would've lapsed before Disney took an interest in 1961 and began putting out their own Pooh works in 1966.
I personally am trying to sell a book to publishers at the moment. I would not bother if part of the deal involved Peter Jackson getting his hands on it and doing to it what he did to LotR. After I'm dead, well, I'm not so worried.
Well, make it part of the deal then. That's fine with me. But since the law is neutral as to artistic quality (some people like what PJ did, others don't, for example) it wouldn't bother me if your copyright expired during your life and someone made a movie based on it. They can't overly associate you with it, but they would get to do their take. And, given that it's just as valid as yours, why not? You would've had time to try yourself, without competition.
Open any newspaper every day of the week: it seems to be happening quite often.
Hm. I don't suppose you saw the study discussing how few artists can support themselves from their copyrights.
Publishers manage to make more money by taking bigger risks than the artists (entitling them to a larger part of the reward) and by betting on a lot of works. Usually only a couple pay off, but the payoff can be quite a lot.
Whatever way you cut it, I'm not going to agree that it would be right for an author to create a popular work which makes perhaps billions for some media corp. while his kids get nothing simply because he got run over the day after it was published.
I'm against tying terms to life -- I think it should be a fixed term of years, so that it's highly predictable.
Besides, what you describe is pretty unusual. What normally happens is that the artist doesn't create a popular work, and his kids get nothing because he just wasn't commercially successful. Artists hardly ever are, at least with regards to royalties. Selling actual pieces, or working for money, usually work better.
nor has the public interest
The public interest has everything to do with it. Why else would the public tolerate copyright? We usually don't like monopolies on commodity goods otherwise, as the efficiencies in a competitive market are desirable.
Artists themselves aren't expected to be charitable, though. They're expected to be greedy, so that they can be exploited. I.e. if an artist wants to make money, dangle the possibility of money in front of him to get him to create things. He immediately serves his own interests, but the public only engages in the exercise to serve its interest.
UK: J.M. Barrie left the play and its income to a children's hospital. The UK government decided (all political parties unopposed) that the hospital should be allowed to keep the money coming in indefinitely. No other publications are affected.
So what? It doesn't matter who gets the money -- it's totally inappropriate for them to get it at all. The copyright has expired, and that's the end of it. For a copyright to last any longer than is necessary to incentivize the author to create the work in question is already an embarrasment to the public. For even that length to be any longer than necessary when the public interest in short terms dictates less, is also an embarrasment to the public.
Plus of course, this particular source of funding is not good for the hospital itself -- it's unpredictable. Some years may have a lot of Peter Pan works, others very few. It would've been better for them to just invest like everyone else does, inclusive of the ability to shift investments to maximize return.
US: Giant media corporation buys a law so it can continue gouging harassed parents in perpetuity. And a million other works are doomed to rot under perpetual copyrights owned by unknown third parties.
Also stupid -- but at least it's not as singularly offensive as a perpetual copyright.
You seem to have the problem a lot of people have with regards to copyright. You have these idiotic romantic notions. Normally they're about such foolish things as natural entitlements of authors or trying to help widows and orphans. Yours is as to allowing any kind of nonsense if it will help a charity, which to my mind sounds like the oft-used 'Won't someone please think of the children' excuse for bad laws and policies.
Copyright is hard-headed utilitarianism, concerned solely with the public good. We'd all be better off if people would just treat it rationally and leave the damn feelings at home.
It's to achieve the greatest public good (with the least encumberance), where the public has equal interests in the creation of original works, derivative works, and having works be unencumbered.
Incidentally, patents and copyrights share the same underlying reasoning, and just differ in subject matter. This is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that they're both in the same clause in the Constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but a great deal of art created under such systems were propaganda made for the benefit of patrons, which is not in the public's interest either.
Well, that still happens today. And at any rate, it doesn't really matter. Copyright is concerned quantity, not quality. You don't want the government making decisions as to which pieces of art should get the most protection. Whether you see high art or low art, it should be the public that decides, and this is basically a matter of where money gets spent. (And of course, one man's high art is another's low art, and there are shifts over time)
The best thing that happened to art was when it was turned into a viable career for anyone to pursue.
When did that happen? Most art is economically worthless; most artists can't treat art as a viable career. The stereotype of the starving artist exists for a reason.
That's not culture, though, that's the pocketbooks of consumers.
What's the difference? You can't make significant objective statements about culture. Certainly the government shouldn't try. But if you can get anything you want for free, however, then at least you can get access to as much of whatever you like; if it cost money, you'd have to prioritize. This lets individuals make their own decisions as to culture.
I want apples to be free, but I can't go into someone's farm and pick a bunch and go sell them at half the going rate because it benefits society. I agree it would be GREAT if that's how the world worked, but it doesn't and all it accomplishes is putting an apple farmer into the poorhouse.
Ever watch Star Trek? They have those replicators that can make apples by rearranging tanks of various raw materials. If we had those starting today, apple farmers would indeed go out of business; why pay them to grow an apple, when you can just get perfect apples, every time, at the push of a button? Putting them out of work, while in the process solving world hunger, seems like a good plan to me.
Creative works are like this now. They're non-rivalrous, meaning that we can reproduce them forever, and no one loses anything. The materials we fix the works into might have some cost associated with them, but it's often pretty minimal (just as the replicators technically need a power source and raw materials, though they can recycle the latter).
Jefferson drew a comparison with fire. If only one person has fire, he can charge people to use it. But everyone can light a taper from his fire, and get their own fire, without diminishing his. This puts the first guy out of business, but now the whole world has illumination.
Copyright isn't intended to help artists. It's intended to get them to create new works (by giving them the incentive of a monopoly) but to also get those works in the public domain as fast as possible, for it is in the public domain that the works can do the most good.
If we gave artists too much of a monopoly, it would directly prevent the works from being in the public domain as fast as possible. If we didn't give them a monopoly, or enough of one, not as many works would be created within the timeframe that is acceptable to us for getting works into the public domain.
But no matter what, we're always looking at the public interest. Whether there are many successful artists or just a few doesn't really matter much. The public wants art, not artists.
This is where copyright went all wrong. If I write a book about "Bob", I don't see why you couldn't write a story about him too. In fact, I would hope you WOULD. I would hope we could work together to make Bob a better-developed cultural fixture, without worrying about licensing and other silliness. On the other hand, I don't want you to take my book and sell it word-for-word without paying me anything. The two do not need to be tied together (though they currently are, in today's world).
What happened was that people started making translations of Uncle Tom's C
No, the public wants several things: They do want to watch Lost. They also want to watch any versions or sequels of Lost that anyone creates. And they also want to get it for free, and for it to be in the public domain. And these interests are equal.
The balance is in how to get as much of this as possible, since it's pretty unlikely that they can get it all. (Though that would be ideal)
Given that what we're really talking about are works generally, and not any specific work, it might be that the way to get the most original works, the most derivative works, and to have the least amount of copyright (in terms of scope and time) will support many works, but not Lost in specific.
Certainly we don't have the kind of copyright laws that could make it economically possible for me to rearrange the stars into exciting new constellations. And no one cares, since it would be art that comes at too high a cost. High budget TV shows might also turn out not to be viable when copyright laws are optimized. That's unfortunate, but not a really bad thing.
The public's right isn't nearly as clear-cut as you're making it out to be.
Yes it is.
Without protection from COMMERCIAL piracy, artists can't afford to create, and there is very little art made, and culture suffers (except in very odd, isolated cases)
No, some artists can't afford to create. Others can. There is always some creation going on regardless of competition. Hell, the idea of copyright didn't even exist anywhere until 1710 -- but there's a lot of art that was created before then.
Besides, copyright harms culture too, by preventing people from getting copies for the lowest possible price (or free), by preventing people from creating derivatives without authorization, by impairing the preservation of works since people can't make and disseminate copies, etc.
Again, the trick is to find the solution that is best for culture. What's best for authors is by no means what's best for culture.
It all depends on who's copying the book and for what purpose.
No, having competition for making copies is always good for the public. It lowers prices, where the copies are identical, and allows different publishers to target different parts of the population. There's no natural monopoly argument in copyright.
It's just that it's difficult to have this in combination with very high levels of creation of original works. But ideally, we'd have both.
Certainly I cannot think of a situation where, if it would not affect creation of original works, it would be good to artificially restrict the freedom of the press with regards to creative works. Care to name one?
(n.b. we're not talking about things like libel, obsecenity, etc. which apply even to the original authors of such materials, regardless of copyright)
This assumes that the people that made the content on the DVD are being compensated in both cases.
No. I'm saying that when a publisher does not have to pay the author, publishing that work is a lot cheaper. These savings can be passed on to the public.
For example, I can download the complete works of Shakespeare from all over the place on the Internet for free. I c
It's a balance thing, though, and I think you're focusing too much on the public's rights here (which given what you're replying to is very understandable).
.avi you downloaded, would you? Ads? Subscription? Do you have a fundamental issue with that, or is it just that no one made it viable?
No, the only interests here are those of the public. The balance is merely in figuring out how to best serve the public. Whether this makes artists happy or not is quite unimportant, save for how that factors into the public interest.
The purpose of copyright, from my understanding, is to keep Company B from taking my idea and turning it into a series of books and selling them all over the world, and not paying me a cent.
Your understanding is wrong then.
The purpose of copyright is to benefit the public. It doesn't protect ideas, by the way (see the statute to this effect at 17 USC 102(b) and also note that the constitution would prohibit such a thing).
Having people reprint books is actually good for the public. Copyrighted works are basically commodities; there's not a significant difference between a DVD made in some factory with the authorization of a studio, and a DVD made in the same factory, without that authorization. But if everyone can make copies, there is competition, and this produces desirable efficiencies and low costs of copies.
So there needs to be a very good reason why we would want to grant a monopoly which impedes this. That reason is that we need the work to be created before we can put it in the public domain. We still want both, of course, so we balance how much copyright to grant (purely so as to spur creation) and how much we don't grant, and how rapidly the copyright expires (so that the work is as unencumbered as possible and we can enjoy that competition asap).
But we don't care about artists for their own sake. Why should we? Why should the public at large have to suffer, just to prop up some artist? If the public ultimately benefits, then that's a good reason. But just as artists say that they don't want to take a loss, neither should the public have to take a loss.
The missing piece of this puzzle is how you compensate creatives who put themselves on the line for the enjoyment of others.
We don't, quite so much. At most, artists merely have an opportunity. Most artists would be financially better off working 9 to 5 jobs. They don't get compensated at all usually (with regards to their copyrights) or in rare cases, just a little bit. Being an artist and hitting it big is on par with winning the lottery.
The advent of digital media
I hate it when people say this. Books are digital media (unless you've noticed a continuous spectrum of letters between A and B). You mean something more like machine readable media.
The thing is that the public needs to realize that creatives need money to survive, too.
Which is why they get, at most, a chance to get money. Actual money depends on whether they do well in the market. And the size of the chance is limited by what's in the public's best interest. It is acceptable for some artists to decide not to create stuff, if the public benefit is more satisfied without them than with them.
If you had a reasonable avenue to compensate the cast and crew of "Lost" for every
If I didn't have to? No.
This might result in the show no longer getting made. That's fine with me, so long as I'm ultimately better off. Some things come at too high a cost, after all. That might be one of them.
the public and the creators have to dial down the rhetoric and talk about how the system can work for everyone.
Working for the public is, by definition, working for everyone. Artists get to enjoy other artists' works on the same basis as everyone else. Maybe even a better one, if they can create unauthorized derivatives, which reduces their costs of creating works.
But special breaks for artists, at the detriment of the public? I don't think so.
Before the Betamax case, who could tell whether a VCR was legal? It was completely undeterminable and took a 5-4 decision in the Supreme court to settle.
Not to mention that the Supreme Court was initially going to hold against Sony, and only eventually decided to hold in their favor.
Yes -- fair use is extremely nebulous. That's a good thing, actually, as it allows it to cover unforeseen circumstances. But it would be good to have some additional exceptions as well, which would apply regardless of fairness.
Yes, you can be sued as a contributory and/or vicarious infringer, depending on what you've been doing.
See, for example, Napster, which wasn't sued for downloading, and wasn't sued for uploading, but was sued for providing assistance to other people who were.
Let's see:
So let's see section 106:
So yeah -- unless there's some applicable exception here (I wouldn't bet on it) -- it's illegal.
I would see it differently. Extending copyright encourages creativity because it shows that if you can come up with good original concept that catches the popular imagination you can make an absolute mint off it. If that does not encourage people to create, or investors to back creative people nothing will.
Well, Disney began at a time when terms, among other things, were much less than they were now. Clearly he didn't need additional encouragement later, so why should there be a retroactive copyright for his work, especially long after he's dead?
But this really ignores the main issue: we don't want to encourage creativity too much. What we want is to best serve the public interest. But the public has several, equal interests. First, they want original works created. Second, they want derivative works created. Third, they want works to be unencumbered -- this means free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Without copyright, we have fully satisfied the third, somewhat satisfied the second, and slightly satisfied the first. We can sum this up and determine the net satisfaction of the public interest.
If we then offered a copyright of, say, 5 years, we'd reduce the immediate satisfaction of the third and second, but hopefully increase satisfaction of the first by a greater amount, and also some satisfaction of the second. We can sum these up too, and see if the net satisfaction is greater or lower than in other scenarios.
What we want is to find the scenario that involves the least restrictive laws and the greatest satisfaction of public interest. This will almost certainly not be the point at which we maximize the first interest -- which is what you were talking about -- because there are other interests at issue as well. (And plus copyright holders don't like competition, so they're known to use their rights as a sword, rather than a shield, and claim infringement to keep up-and-coming artists out of the marketplace; maximum creation of original works is thus probably impossible)
Given that most artists will never see economic value from their copyrights at all, and yet are encouraged to create, and given that in the rare cases that they do, this is almost always realized immediately (the vast majority of revenue for any medium is made when a work is first released in that medium, and dies off days-months afterwards), I think that we could still get the vast majority of creation we see now -- maybe more -- even if copyright terms were extremely short. And we'd all be better off too, since this would encourage more work in derivatives, and more freedom with regards to created works.
Preventing people from rehashing old ideas from the 30's and 40's is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is actually, all else being equal. A lot of the best work is derivative, where people spend more time on polish than the underlying concept. For example Shakespeare's plays were virtually all either based on history, or earlier plays and stories which he made new versions of. He was not a big original thinker. That shouldn't be held against him -- he was good.
I think what it boils down to, is that it is perfectly legal to download one copy of a show, but it is illegal to distribute.
Nope. Every time you have a purported fair use, you run through the analysis again. There's no sort of numerical limit involved, nor a hard rule against any kind of infringement rather than any other.
MPAA, like RIAA, has just been going after people that are easy for it to find, and who are further up the chain.
I.e. getting rid of P2P networks (as they tried in Napster and are trying in Grokster) prevents or impairs lots of people downstream from sharing since they can't use that network any more. Getting rid of trackers affects lots of people further down as well. Getting rid of uploaders at least affects some downloaders and leechers. Getting rid of downloaders doesn't really have affects on others at all. It's a simple 'attack the head of the snake' principle.
Fair use allows any otherwise infringing activity, so long as it is fair. It's just that it's probably easier to successfully argue that reproduction is fair than that distribution is fair, given the circumstances involved.
You can see what's infringing at 17 USC 106, and how to determine whether there is a fair use by using the four listed factors at 17 USC 107.
created by the government which, by their nature was funded by taxpayer dollars, was immediately public domain
This isn't correct. Only US government works are uncopyrightable, and that's due to a statute saying so. State works are copyrightable, and frequently are copyrighted. Due process may prevent states from using copyright to impede public access to laws, but that's not the whole of their output. Plus, even the federal government can fund projects by others, which are still copyrighted by the person who did the work at taxpayer expense.
Still, it would be nice for one reform in copyright law to be making works created by or at government expense public domain works. The public shouldn't have to pay twice.
The volume of PD titles on CSS-encrypted DVDs should not matter. There should need be only one to have a standing case.
Setting aside certain issues regarding what standing means, and what you'd actually need to have it, I didn't say that the point couldn't be raised in a case. In fact, it has been, several times, IIRC. It just isn't likely to work until there are a lot of public domain works on DVD, or whatever.
Does this mean that its settled and back to congress, or will the Supremes have to hear and rule too before the setaside is final?
If the FCC petitions the Supreme Court for cert., and Supreme Court decides to hear the case (which is totally up to them), then the case isn't over. But this doesn't prevent Congress from acting in the meantime to clarify the law, even were the Supreme Court to reverse the DC Circuit.
If only that were true. The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent access controls protecting a copyrighted work, and forbids the distribution of tools to do so. So, even if a Mickey Mouse DVD one day falls into the public domain, all Disney need to do is release a new movie with the same 'access controls' and no one can traffic in the circumvention tool that would let them play the public domain DVD either.
This is why it is technically true, but not practically true. But as I said, numbers might be convincing.
So yes, the DMCA does effectively give perpetual copyrights.
Well, perpetual anti-circumvention rights anyway. This is part of the problem -- they're technically not copyrights. In fact, there's even dispute as to whether it's constitutional for Congress to do this, given the contours of the copyright power.
The one that set aside the broadcast flag, based on the lack of congressionally given authority on the part of the FCC to issue such a rule.
;)
The Supreme Court did no such thing. They haven't even heard the case.
The court that did that was the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Basically, you see, there are three levels of federal Art. III courts in the US: District Courts, which are trial-level courts in which cases are first heard; Circuit Courts, which are the courts to which one appeals if unsuccessful at trial; and the Supreme Court, which may hear appellate-level cases if it chooses, and to which one petitions if unsuccessful previously (almost always at the Circuit level).
I'm sure the 12 judges on the DC Circuit are very smart, and certainly it's such an eminent court that it's often viewed as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court (e.g. Justices Ginsburg, Scalia, and Thomas are all former DC Cir. judges), but any of them would tell you that it's not the Supreme Court.
For starters, it's like 10 blocks away.
That's not technically true, just practically true.
1201 et seq only apply to works protected under Title 17. Once a work hits the public domain, it's okay to circumvent with regards to it.
However, when this argument was tried with regards to DeCSS in conjunction with CSS-encrypted public domain movies on DVD, it flopped, since the courts that looked at the issue didn't think that this was a real impediment to getting those works generally, and that it would make these provisions pretty useless if that argument were accepted.
Once most movies on DVD are in the public domain, something currently scheduled for the mid to late 21st century, perhaps it will find a more receptive audience. Personally I'd like to think we'll come to our senses and get rid of the DMCA and generally fix copyright law, long before then.
DMCA really does a whole lot of different things.
As far as classical copyright goes, I'd say its overall effect was to limit its scope very slightly.
The WIPO and Design portions of the act do increase the rights of artists, but are probably more accurately described as being paracopyright provisions, rather than real copyright provisions.
No.
First, the DMCA doesn't extend copyright terms. You're thinking of the Copyright Term Extension Act, also known as the Sonny Bono Act. They're different things.
Second, the DMCA was passed in 1998. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled -- just as the lower courts that had heard the issue had -- that Congress could retroactively extend copyrights. (No one has AFAIK challenged prospective extensions) That case, Eldred, hadn't been a factor leading up to the DMCA or the CTEA.
So you might want to know what the hell you're talking about before you post the next time.
What Supreme Court opinion are you talking about?
I don't believe you're correct with your statements about overnight success in the creative field being common. Frankly I believe it's not. Unless you're consdering 5+ years overnight success. I believe that the majority of authors (and musos) plug away for years basically on stuff that just "pays the bills". A single work may become a bestseller, but many authors/musos will have a considerable back catalog built up by then. So you can hardly call that overnight success.
That's not what I'm calling overnight success.
What I'm saying is that first, success of any amount is rare. Second, that for any particular work, if it will be a successful work, this will usually become evident rapidly. The same is not true for authors.
That is to say, the 20th novel, if it is a hit, will be a hit right within the first little while after it is on shelves. That's not true for the author; just each of his works. And again, most authors start out obscure and stay that way, and never succeed. Most of their works are obscure, and never succeed. Think about how many rejections are sent out in proportion to acceptances, and how few accepted, published books are hits. Success is rare, but on the few instances it is encountered -- with regards to works -- it is rapid.
If you go back to my example since copyright has expired on the previous books and they've moved into the public domain the author who has "just got by" for the last 20 years misses out when those books finally start reaping big rewards.
But it's unlikely that those old books will be bestsellers. His latest book is, in your example, but that only gets people interested in it. His back catalog may not hold the same appeal (for example, maybe the recent book is quite different from his older ones, or at least reflects a more mature author), and certainly doesn't have the buzz the latest book has. What he ought to do is capitalize on his success by writing more books. Not so much trying to get people to buy what they wouldn't buy before.
As for the copyright as a spur comment. If the author is getting bugger all on those first books there is an increased chance they will give up at some point. Cave in to the pressures of paying bills and stop creating because they can't see a reward.
Well, given that most authors fail to get rich, it's a good thing that they're basically optimists, write as their day job, or write for reasons other than money.
But like I said, even if you do strike it rich, the back catalog is unlikely to do much. Losing the oldest parts of it (though n.b. that I propose copyrights that max out at 25 years, so there'd still be a good chance that his works would be protected for a while, all being of differing ages, unless he had given up on them and stopped renewing the copyright) isn't likely to have a great impact.
The fact that he has a history of 0 successes and 19 failures is what'll do him in. He has no reason to believe that number 20 will be different. Whether he has the rights to his old works or not doesn't factor into that.
Regarding the licensing/copyright with employees and companies. I still don't see that it's a bad situation. For one thing if it's legislated there can be rules on how the contracts are structured. For example, they could rule that a creator is entitled to a certain percentage of the profit as well as a salary. Or that after x number of years the license is no longer exclusive and the copyright owner gains the right to license it to other companies. It also means if a company goes belly up there is no confusion over who owns the copyright. Similarly, if the legislation were written right licenses would be non transferrable. So IBM couldn't sell the license to Microsoft. It'd rely on the creators consent to sell the license.
And considering most of us already sign some form of contract when we get a job I don't see it as being a huge additional expense. The vast majority of jobs would have very simple contracts with stan
Huh? Since when do you pay "rent" when you buy a book or a CD? You buy it, you own it.
Rent-seeking is when you try to get value out of others without giving them anything in return. It's common with regards to monopolies, since a monopoly can charge above market prices without materially losing business. Copyrights are a monopoly since they allow copyright holders to charge more for copies of a work (for example) than you'd pay if there were no copyright.
Copyright holders generally view anything that touches on their work as being infringing, even if it's not. It's not enough for them to have a monopoly on the work within the bounds of copyright, but they try to expand those bounds as widely as possible as well. This is a form of rent-seeking behavior since they're trying to get rights beyond what what might have properly been granted to them to begin with.
the work itself
The work itself can't be taken; it can't be owned. Works are not the same thing as copyrights pertaining to those works, or copies, which are tangible objects in which the works are fixed.
At any rate, if the work is published, then it's out there.
the ability to charge a fair (or inflated) price for that work
That ability stems from copyright. If no copyright is granted, then there is no ability to be taken. (However, an author can still charge people just to initially publish his work, but copyright or a lack of copyright doesn't matter for that)
For example, until recently, architectural works weren't copyrightable. No one considered that to be a taking of anything however. Copyrights are artificial -- they don't exist until granted. Your argument is similar to saying that when people don't have sex, they're killing the children that they might have otherwise had.
Remember that those who say "no copyrights" are doing so in an environment where copyright does exist, so that change is, itself, an attempt at taking
But not as to future copyrights, like I said, since they don't exist yet.
Depends on how long you take to create the work, and how high you define "high" to be. Being able to feed one's family on the profits isn't considered "high" by many people.
The trick is opportunity costs.
Let's say that you are a writer. If you write a novel, it will take one year of writing, and the labor involved will prevent you from working at a job. We'll say that if the novel is a success, that the present value of all the money you'd make from it is $100,000, which is actually high. But the odds of success are 0.01% -- most manuscripts are rejected after all, most that are published don't sell well, etc., and this reflects the rarity of such success.
This means that we can assign a value to book writing of $10, i.e. 0.01% of $100,000.
If you didn't write the novel, you could've worked at a job and earned the present value of $30,000. The odds of getting a job that pays that much are probably rather higher, let's call it 30% just to pick something. After all, most people have a job (How many people do you personally know with a job? How many people do you personally know who are novelists earling $100k/book? There's a reason why one is rarer than the other.) and this pay isn't anything amazing.
This means we can assign a value to working a job of $9,000, i.e. 30% of $30,000.
If you want to provide for your family, you will work at the job. It pays better, all things considered.
(This is a simplified example, but you get the idea)
Publishers make the odds work a little bit more in their favor (though not perfectly -- most published works don't turn a profit or not a substantial one) by screening out works that they think will flop, by investing in marketing, etc. They put in money up front -- more money than the author essentially lost by writing in the first place. Usually they lose it, because most works flop
No, he might just have one extremely high resolution picture. Who knows?
Ah, well, bear in mind that I went to law school so that I wouldn't have to do math, particularly integral calculus.
This is why the first copyright law speaks of it being an act to encourage learning, why the Constitution speaks of the purpose of copyright being to promote the progress of science, why we see Jefferson saying that (in reference to patents, but the argument is the same):
and why we see the courts frequently discuss the policy for having copyrights.
Plus of course, the rampant piracy we're seeing these days indicates that the public only believes in copyright up to a point. That point, I suspect, is commercial infringement. If they believed copyright law as it exists now were proper, they probably wouldn't violate it all the time.
Me, I'm all for copyright -- when it serves the public interest. And against it if it is harmful to the public. This isn't a very difficult position to adopt, but does require a little bit of looking beyond one's own nose.
I can't imagine that A.A. Milne would have been very enthusiastic if he'd known that Winnie the Pooh was going to be buggered for decades by the Disney Corp.
No worries there, then. Milne wrote the first Pooh book in 1926, and sold off the merchandising rights quite rapidly. The big to-do of late was between Disney and the widow of the man Milne sold his rights to -- so he evidently didn't care about the long term profits from other uses of the characters.
'Course, with a 25 year copyright, it would've lapsed before Disney took an interest in 1961 and began putting out their own Pooh works in 1966.
I personally am trying to sell a book to publishers at the moment. I would not bother if part of the deal involved Peter Jackson getting his hands on it and doing to it what he did to LotR. After I'm dead, well, I'm not so worried.
Well, make it part of the deal then. That's fine with me. But since the law is neutral as to artistic quality (some people like what PJ did, others don't, for example) it wouldn't bother me if your copyright expired during your life and someone made a movie based on it. They can't overly associate you with it, but they would get to do their take. And, given that it's just as valid as yours, why not? You would've had time to try yourself, without competition.
Open any newspaper every day of the week: it seems to be happening quite often.
Hm. I don't suppose you saw the study discussing how few artists can support themselves from their copyrights.
Publishers manage to make more money by taking bigger risks than the artists (entitling them to a larger part of the reward) and by betting on a lot of works. Usually only a couple pay off, but the payoff can be quite a lot.
Whatever way you cut it, I'm not going to agree that it would be right for an author to create a popular work which makes perhaps billions for some media corp. while his kids get nothing simply because he got run over the day after it was published.
I'm against tying terms to life -- I think it should be a fixed term of years, so that it's highly predictable.
Besides, what you describe is pretty unusual. What normally happens is that the artist doesn't create a popular work, and his kids get nothing because he just wasn't commercially successful. Artists hardly ever are, at least with regards to royalties. Selling actual pieces, or working for money, usually work better.
nor has the public interest
The public interest has everything to do with it. Why else would the public tolerate copyright? We usually don't like monopolies on commodity goods otherwise, as the efficiencies in a competitive market are desirable.
Artists themselves aren't expected to be charitable, though. They're expected to be greedy, so that they can be exploited. I.e. if an artist wants to make money, dangle the possibility of money in front of him to get him to create things. He immediately serves his own interests, but the public only engages in the exercise to serve its interest.
UK: J.M. Barrie left the play and its income to a children's hospital. The UK government decided (all political parties unopposed) that the hospital should be allowed to keep the money coming in indefinitely. No other publications are affected.
So what? It doesn't matter who gets the money -- it's totally inappropriate for them to get it at all. The copyright has expired, and that's the end of it. For a copyright to last any longer than is necessary to incentivize the author to create the work in question is already an embarrasment to the public. For even that length to be any longer than necessary when the public interest in short terms dictates less, is also an embarrasment to the public.
Plus of course, this particular source of funding is not good for the hospital itself -- it's unpredictable. Some years may have a lot of Peter Pan works, others very few. It would've been better for them to just invest like everyone else does, inclusive of the ability to shift investments to maximize return.
US: Giant media corporation buys a law so it can continue gouging harassed parents in perpetuity. And a million other works are doomed to rot under perpetual copyrights owned by unknown third parties.
Also stupid -- but at least it's not as singularly offensive as a perpetual copyright.
You seem to have the problem a lot of people have with regards to copyright. You have these idiotic romantic notions. Normally they're about such foolish things as natural entitlements of authors or trying to help widows and orphans. Yours is as to allowing any kind of nonsense if it will help a charity, which to my mind sounds like the oft-used 'Won't someone please think of the children' excuse for bad laws and policies.
Copyright is hard-headed utilitarianism, concerned solely with the public good. We'd all be better off if people would just treat it rationally and leave the damn feelings at home.
No it isn't.
It almost is.
It's to achieve the greatest public good (with the least encumberance), where the public has equal interests in the creation of original works, derivative works, and having works be unencumbered.
Incidentally, patents and copyrights share the same underlying reasoning, and just differ in subject matter. This is evidenced by, among other things, the fact that they're both in the same clause in the Constitution.