| > It completely fails if, for example, an author spends 4 years unpaid writing their latest book, and after the first copy is sold anybody is free to duplicate the words from that book without giving the author a penny for that work. One of the specific reasons for copyright is to ensure that the author is granted exclusivity over sale of the works, such that they can earn a fair wage to compensate for the 4 years of their life without any income at all. I completely agree with you. Authors should have a monopoly over the distribution of their work "for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work". > How us it unfair that if that author lives another 50 years and people are happy paying for the book for the next 50 years, the author should continue receiving money for it, rather than just some unrelated party whose only skill is being able to scan and reprint the book for basically the cost of the paper? You are framing this in an emotional, artificially limited scenario under the category of fairness. The reality is that copyright has been extended multiple times for works that had already been written for the benefit of huge corporations that lobbied for it. The revenue of an accomplished author for their family is a feel good pretense for this. They did not play any role in the political decision process for this. The authors of these works created them without the expectancy of lifelong copyright protection and even copyright protection for their descendants. That did not stop them from creating these works and had they expected lifelong copyright I am certain we now would not have significantly more works from this time frame. You are portraying only the author in this and postulating copyright like a natural right that is only fair. It is not. Copyright is censorship. It is not fair to censor the derivative works of others or to demand payment from people for obtaining copies of decades old works; to use your category of the subjective feeling of fairness. Much more importantly than the feeling of it being fair: It is unjust. Copyright is censorship. It restricts access to information and culture. We initially imposed this censorship as a societal contract between the public and an author to incentivize the creation of more works. We restrict people from sharing a work and even from creating their own derivative creative work of it, because only through this censorship the work being censored even came to be. Therefore the result of that censorship is more expression, art and information, not less. This is why the censorship of copyright is justifiable. Any copyright term beyond this is unjust. You speak of copying as an unskilled, dishonorable act. Copying is what our civilization including all the great works you want to monopolize are built on. All significant works are derivative works to some degree. We now live in a world where through the monopolization of creative works under few huge media conglomerates these conglomerates effectively own large parts of our culture. The lengthy copyright terms give these corporations exclusive controls over many aspects of our cultural heritage. We still make adaptions to ancient mythology to this day, but the cultural canon of our society has greatly expanded since them. Mythology and fairy tales only grew to what they are because there was no copyright on them. What we are doing today to our modern cultural heritage is like the ancient Greeks putting copyright on mythologies. Had they done that our literature would be much poorer today. Would we limit copyright terms our literature would be much richer today by allowing people to write their own derivative works to the cultural goods of our age. |