|
|
|
|
|
|
by EvanAnderson
1738 days ago
|
|
|
Our copyright terms need to be reasonable. They aren't reasonable right now. The term has been ratcheted up from the original 14 years with an option for a 14 year renewal to the ridiculous author's live plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication/120 years from creation (which ever is shorter) for works for hire. I'm all for keeping much of the current copyright regime around, including extending the term to some reasonable period after the author's lifetime. The terms need to be reasonable. Copyright is granted by society. It should be based on give and take. Historically "normies" haven't paid any attention to it and the only parties who have had any say have been those who had a vested financial interest in increasing copyright terms. It has been a "take and take" relationship. Preventing works from entering the public domain also has a "pulling up the ladder" effect. It prevents new works based upon older works from having economic value. The Walt Disney company's success and subsequent lobbying to extend copyright terms is a particularly galling example of this to me. I'm not sure what you mean re: "...maybe forever (like indigenous culture)." Are you suggesting that making works that are derivative from indigenous cultures should be prohibited? At some level all of our stories are from the "indigenous culture" of all of humanity. There are no new stories under the sun. |
|
|
For patents, it's important to ensure that ideas become available for everyone else to enjoy despite giving a monopoly to the inventor. That's because an invention may be the best way to do something and we would be worse off if we couldn't use it. Copyright, on the other hand, doesn't protect anything fundamentally important. It's just individual products of human creativity. If you want a cartoon animal, you can always create your own without having to build on Mickey Mouse. The protected ones don't really matter except that they've been pushed into popular culture and people have lapped them up. We could do our culture in a way that doesn't suck at the teat of industrial culture-generation factories like Disney if we didn't want the impediment of copyright.
So I don't think your argument about give and take is really convincing. We could even have infinite copyright and the world would get along fine. If some obnoxious copyright owner enforced their rights to strongly, somebody else could create an equivalent work that was just as good to replace it.
I don't think they'd do it without copyright though, as evidenced by the fact that almost nobody does. Even open source developers still use copyright to restrict distribution (GPL) and amature artists demand credit (CC-BY).