Copyright does no longer exist to protect creators, but to protect the distributors. We badly need a reform.
The problem with copyright is that it is used as an excuse to deliver the good idea to protect the new authors who are still alive, in the same package with the bad idea to let unspecified number of loosely related and unrelated people feed off free money source created by long dead authors decades ago.
I think part of the idea is that whether the creators are dead or not, having copyright and "unrelated people feed off", still maintains an economy over the item and gives it monetary value. Whereas if it was de-copyrighted it would lose that value -- everybody could just copy it.
E.g. Disney only being able to create or allow the creation of Mickey Mouse stuff (t-shirts etc), leads to a large business for them, taxes for US etc. (Plus pays a lobby to ensure longer copyright). If Mickey Mouse was suddenly public domain, that would stop and its characters would be devalued very fast, with everybody competing with ever cheaper products with him on.
Twenty years ought to be enough to recoup your investment, but I'm open to compromise. In any case, (rougly) 150 years, as it currently is, is way, way, way, way, way, way way too long.
Isn't letting them keep their copyright for long, an even stronger inventive for OTHERS to come up with some new characters? (in order to compete with them).
Ever notice how restaurants and movies never use "the Happy Birthday song"? That's because Warner Bros claimed copyright on it for decades. Another part of our culture that can't be used thanks to copyright.
There are plenty of films, plays, and TV series based on works in the public domain. Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Sherlock Holmes to name just a few that come to mind. Should those creators be required to pay tribute to the descendants of the long-dead authors in order to use those parts of our shared culture?
Being granted exclusive protections during your lifetime or for a reasonable period of time after the creation of a work is defensible. De facto perpetual protections afforded to the artist's grandchildren (or great^n-grandchildren), not so much.
Could Disney have become this successful without free access to public domain works like Cinderella, Snow White, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and so on and so forth? Possibly. But insisting that their works should be protected far beyond the protections their source material ever had is hypocrisy at best, anti-competitive at worst.
No, it wasn't.
The first copyright law adopted under the Constitution may have established that length, but that's a very different thing.
I think you have the whole process upside down. Digital media already has no value, and it can already be copied freely.
The changes in the law that Disney and other copyright maximalists are doing is attempting to re-value digital media. So, the only option open to them is to push for ever more draconian laws simply to protect their broken and outdated business models.
Not a great source but: http://questioncopyright.org/promise
The problem with hard power is, that it is expensive. If it wasn't police states would work wonderfully. Instead, the government needs cooperation of the people by formulating the law in ways that are acceptable to the people. By providing thought systems propagated through school and media appropriate patterns are engraved in the nations minds. People need to either think "this law is just" or "i don't want to go to jail for that" or "i don't want to lose everything that i hold dearly" or "i don't want my family to starve" for the spells of the law to work.
We are more and more coming to a point where the proponents of copyright law must either step up the propaganda, the enforcement or change the law.
Only for total enforcement, and only when the technology is not advanced enough to make even that cheap.
Here's a hypothetical example: with widespread internet surveillance, you could just charge people immediately on the first sign of them pirating something -- take the money off of their bank accounts/salary, kind of the same way one gets a traffic ticket through camera surveillance, but even faster.
>If it wasn't police states would work wonderfully.
Who said that they don't? It's often not the police state that fails, it is the state in general, and for other reasons.