Dragaera

Artificial release dates and online publishing

David Dyer-Bennet dd-b at dd-b.net
Fri Dec 13 00:50:48 PST 2002

Scott Ingram <singram at videotron.ca> writes:

> > Setting the term of the legally granted monopoly is always tricky.  I
> > feel that the current copyright terms are grossly excessive.  I
> > thought life + 50 was too long.  You can argue for a long time about
> > what the "right" term for copyright on a book is (and it's not
> > necessarily the same as the right time for a movie, a song, a
> > recording of a performance of a song, or any other type of work).
> 
> Why do you believe life + 50 is excessive? The only reason I can see that
> being excessive is in an effort to avoid inadvertant plagiarism.  I believe
> Spider Robinson wrote a short story proposing that there were a limited
> number of pleasant melodies out there and that copyright was crippling human
> creativity. One such case of inadvertant plagiarism is George Harrison's "My
> Sweet Lord" vs the Chifton's "He's so fine". But even those two songs were
> only 8 years apart, and I gotta believe that you think 8 years is
> insufficient protection.

Life plus 50 years (and I'll point out that the current law is
actually longer than that -- 70 now, or something?) strikes me as too
long largely because it used to be much shorter, and that seemed to
work fine.  

I have a few rough rules of thumb.

Copyright shouldn't expire during the original creators life, because
they shouldn't have to watch helplessly while other people rape their
babies. 

Copyright shouldn't extend indefinitely, because it's important to
have a common creative heritage that all can draw from.  

It's much more important to reward individual human beings who
actually create things than it is to create valuable "property". 

Discussions over the years have pointed out some other things -- such
as that if copyright doesn't extend significantly past death, creators
who are old will have a difficult time negotiating decent terms on new
works.  "We can't pay you much for this, because you'll probably die
in the next 5 years, and all we're buying from you is the license to
use your copyright; if that ends in 5 years, it's not worth much to
us." 

This leaves me thinking that "life + 25" is a vaguely reasonable place
to end up.  It's by no means a "precisely right" point. 

These points only apply to fields where the original creators are
major players.  Written fiction is such a field.  Maybe music is to
some extent still.  Movies and TV are definitely different.  
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net  /  http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
 John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net
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