28 years isn't even long enough for the author to die. As a creator, I want to maintain my copyrights at least as long as I live.
I say go make your own backdrops, your own universe.
I say go make your own backdrops, your own universe.
You are free to want whatever you like, though many other creators recognize the desirability of shorter copyright terms.
However, the purpose of copyright law is not to give creators whatever they want. It is to provide limited exclusive rights in order to promote creation. This is literally written into the US Constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It is not supposed to. If you write a great best seller on your first shot and get paid for life, would you be encouraged to try and write another one?
Before copyright, artists lived under the wing of nobility which provided them with food and shelter in exchange for their creations. The problem with this system is there were not enough nobles around to finance all the starving artists. Also artists lucky enough to find a noble or king to finance them had to keep creating or get kicked out.
Copyright was supposed to provide the same kind of incentive: you can live of your creation for a little while, but you have to keep creating. Then congress defined "a little while" as life + 70 years and the Supreme Court somehow agreed ...
Edit: grammar
Edit2: added congress to the mix
It's a warm and fuzzy statement you make, but what's the argument about why this is good, for child or society?
The purpose of copyright is explicitly stated to be "to promote the sciences and useful arts". Copyright's temporary monopoly over works is designed to compensate the author for having written them. Without public domain, there is no advancement, as future authors cannot build upon earlier works.
If I ever reference the sword Excalibur, or the outlaw Robin Hood, or the raising of Lazarus, I am using cultural references. Under the reign of permanent copyright, these references, which can enrich a work considerably, would not be allowed. In 100 years, authors will not be allowed to make reference to Harry Potter, or Frodo, or Luke Skywalker, a great cultural loss.
Incidentally JRR Tolkien died in 1973 so you'll be able to recycle characters from Lord of the Rings to your heart's content in 29 years as long as the law doesn't change; you just won't be able to use the footage from the movies or quote the script insofar as it differs from the novel. A literary parody has been around for a few decades already, I think it's called Bored of the Rings.
Uhh, literature does not work like technology. Authors can and do create entire universes out of whole cloth. Of course, they will be influenced by countless other works, but copyright has no bearing their unless it's a barefaced rip-off.
In fact, I would guess that most creators want to create their own work rather than build on top of others'. Firstly, because of ego, because the work would be all their own. Secondly, this allows the maximum amount of creative ability without being shackled by a backstory that they had no influence on.
The natural state of affairs would be that anyone is free to see or listen to (etc) some content, and then make marks on paper, or patterns of bits, or sound waves that are more or less faithful copies of that.
Copyright is unnatural. It's not worth hashing out the arguments for or against it, or for or against any particular length, here. But the onus is clearly on supporters of long copyright terms to show how the benefits offset the downsides of restricting everyone else's freedoms in this way.
Stories are sometimes different, but I imagine that forcing the public at large to always start from scratch (or at least from a largely static landscape of compositions) precludes a lot of good works that we can't predict in advance. e.g. sampling in electronic music either uses really old music or doesn't bother with the law until an act gets big.
At the same time, an author wants to benefit from and maintain creative control over how their work is used. I'm kind of interested in the following question: If copyright expires after the author's death, why do we respect their wishes in life but not in death? Just because they won't be offended when they're dead? Or is it because we regard their ideas as property and dead people can't own things? In which case, why can't it be passed down through the family in perpetuity and thus be restricted as long as the owners wish for all time?
I feel like the right balance is some reasonable fixed term rather than the life of the author since both of those scenarios feel wrong to me.
Yes, and that is what patent terms aim to do. The monopoly is there to allow inventors to profit and so to continue to develop and invent. The monopoly is initially exchanged for the explicit disclosure of the invention. Without this deal the public domain would remain sparse as in order to profit (or really 'in order to break even' in many fields of endeavour) inventors would otherwise tend to choose to keep their inventions secret and deprive the public domain of the knowledge of how the invention is worked.
Now, of course the development cycle of almost all patentable things has shortened with increased technology and industrialisation. So patent terms in many areas are probably a bit too long as well. But patents protection can realistically be an order of magnitude shorter term than some current copyrights will prove to be, and certainly with no less work put in to the creation.
Meanwhile, the stories of authors who published to indifference only to see their work become popular many years later are too numerous to mention. Many artists sacrifice their economic wellbeing on the altar of their artistic endeavor, and in matters of individual copyright ownership it's not unreasonable to take that into account.
Every work of art is derived from previous works.
Copyright is a trade between the author and society. The author releases the work to society at large, and in exchange, society provides a means to be rewarded for releasing it.
You can own a story entirely, so long as you do not release it. Then, nobody can take it from you, and you will never see those characters do anything beyond what you say they do. But if you want to share it with others, you must accept that they will eventually write things based on it.
This is a terrible analogy. If I take your house, I have deprived you of its use. If I make a copy of something you wrote, of what are you being deprived? Do you not still have access to your writing?
You expect to profit by selling copies of your work and you task the State with preventing me from doing so, thereby limiting my freedom to do whatever I want with my own physical property (my pen and my paper).
That's the nature of the copyright bargain, and everyone more or less agrees that it's a net gain for society. But do not lose track of what's going on here.
You expect to profit by selling copies of your work and you task the State with preventing me from doing so, thereby limiting my freedom to do whatever I want with my own physical property (my pen and my paper).
Not true at all. You can do whatever you like with your pen and paper, and it will even be copyright-protected. You don't sell with your pen and paper, you compose and/or copy with them. It's the commercial transfer of intellectual property that copyright laws regulate, not the act of creation as such.
The original analogy is flawed, but so is your counter-argument. The intangibility of authorship doesn't obviate its legal existence - otherwise whole classes of contractual relations would be impossible.
"right to the residual income from its resale" sounds like a very weird right to me, and doesn't really come from any sound ethical foundation. In fact, it's exactly the opposite for physical goods. If I buy a deck of cards, and then sell (or give) it to somebody else, I've technically deprived the creator of the deck of cards of residual income from resale, but they don't have a right to it from the first sale doctrine.