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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. |