In a previous job, I had to fix a customer's system that had a dodgy hard disk that had failed (as these things do).
Mind you, had they called us when they first started getting messages about "Unable to read from C:" rather than ignoring them for several weeks, I may have been able to recover a bit more data than I did.
So, make copyright extend for the lifetime of the human (not corporate) creator; but once it passes from the control of the creator, then they copyright period is N years, period.
With this, if N = 20, then Melville's works would be (C) H. Melville until his death. At that point, they copyright would be inherited by his heirs, and they would hold it for a maximum of 20 years. If at some point in his life Neville decided to sell the copyright for one of his works to some other individual or corporation, then the copyright on the work would last 20 years from the date of the sale.
Nope: make it 20 (or whatever) years full-stop. If the copyright period gets reset everytime it gets sold, we end up back in the same position we are in now - all you would have to do is have two companies continually selling stuff back and forth and the copyright would never expire.
I like the 'life of author' limit as long as they retain the copyright, but I would add that if the author held the copyright at the time of death, it enters the public domain if it has existed for >20 years, or goes to whoever they willed it to if <20 years.
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Mind you, had they called us when they first started getting messages about "Unable to read from C:" rather than ignoring them for several weeks, I may have been able to recover a bit more data than I did.
Stupid, all of them...
With this, if N = 20, then Melville's works would be (C) H. Melville until his death. At that point, they copyright would be inherited by his heirs, and they would hold it for a maximum of 20 years. If at some point in his life Neville decided to sell the copyright for one of his works to some other individual or corporation, then the copyright on the work would last 20 years from the date of the sale.
Nope: make it 20 (or whatever) years full-stop. If the copyright period gets reset everytime it gets sold, we end up back in the same position we are in now - all you would have to do is have two companies continually selling stuff back and forth and the copyright would never expire.
I like the 'life of author' limit as long as they retain the copyright, but I would add that if the author held the copyright at the time of death, it enters the public domain if it has existed for >20 years, or goes to whoever they willed it to if <20 years.
Something like that, anyway.