[lostcolony]

...no, I don't think they do.

Copyright exists for the sole reason of -promoting- the creation of works (by allowing the creator to have a monopoly on it long enough to extract profit).

If a creator no longer wishes to sell those copies...the copyright's very purpose is undermined. Obviously the law as written allows them to do so, but the law as explicitly intended should not do so.

Certainly, outside of the particulars of the law they have no such right. It's not a 'god given' one, or any such thing; preventing people from making copies of something is in fact extremely unnatural and goes against what has allowed our species' cultures to flourish.

[chrismcb]

No it isn't... The fact that I no longer wasnt to distribute my work didn't mean you get to take that right from me. I created the work for the sole purpose of making a limited edition. It incentivized me to create it, and because it was a limited edition I may have made more money... But now you say you get to copy it because you want to? What is the point of giving control to the creator, if you are just going to take that control away, if you don't like how they are distributing it? I don't believe the law gives any intention on distribution.

[lostcolony]

And if I have a copy of your work already, and I want to distribute it myself, what is to stop me?

For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, nothing. Copyright is a fairly new invention. It doesn't take a law to allow me to distribute works I have a copy of that are not my creation; it takes a law to stop me.

The law was created to stop me so that you, the creator, -could- control how it was distributed, for your profit. For a limited time. Those are the key bits; it was to allow you to profit from it, and it was to be a limited time. Mickey Mouse lawyers and "forever minus a day" notwithstanding, that was the goal.

If a work is no longer sold not because the original creator(s) decided it should be 'limited', but because the original creator is no longer determinable, i.e., an orphaned work, it's perfectly reasonable to put it into the public domain, as quite clearly, the goal of allowing the creator to make money from it no longer applies. It's also why extending copyright makes no sense.

But that's neither here nor there; my point was simply that copyright is an unnatural thing, one created by society with the idea that it better society, and in instances like this that breaks down.