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When Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, copyright was 28 years, or 56 if you are approved for an extension. I'm not advocating 14 years; I think 28-56 is fair. Clearly Heinlein would have written the book under those terms, because he did.

Yes, a Starship Troopers movie would have been released with shorter copyright terms. It is cheaper to make a movie if you do not have to pay for the IP. Movies based on expired works are common, like Disney's movies based on books by Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm. Derivative works can be very profitable.

    > I'm not advocating 14 years; I think 28-56 is fair.

As I said I don't agree with the current state of copyright and think it should probably be much shorter, but it's interesting that discussions on this matter are rarely backed up with data. Why do you prefer 28-56 over 14, or 28-56 over 18-46?

Before you mentioned that "every artist on this list is dead" as if it were patently absurd for copyright to survive the author. Maybe it is, but to use my previous example why would a talented author is his 80s with young children write another novel if that were the case instead of going into the real estate business?

    > Yes, a Starship Troopers movie would have been released with
    > shorter copyright terms. It is cheaper to make a movie if you do
    > not have to pay for the IP.

You have to factor in movie studios being reluctant to base their works on public domain work because it makes it harder to create a franchise out of it. With a big hit like Starship Troopers being in the public domain nothing's stopping some other studio from releasing Starship Troopers 2, or selling action figures with that name etc.

It's sometimes advantageous that a work you want to use is copyrighted, because that means you can secure exclusive rights to publish a derived work based on it.

> why would a talented author is his 80s with young children write another novel

I know this is HN and money is the name of the game, but... some people like creating things and if they want to do it in their 80s, they will. (Also it's extremely unlikely you'll have young children in your 80s) I doubt anyone publishes their first book with high expectation of success and huge income. So why would it be the case for the last one?

srsly Tolkien was a chump

Sarcasm you chumps

Jesus the guy wrote Silmarillion in his seventies, a book that had no chance of being a bestseller and he barely lived to finish. Tolkien didn't write because he thought it was a "sweet gig", he wrote because he was a writer.

There is this mindset that refuses to believe that any motivation other than money is suspect, the nerd community used to be blessedly free from it.

I don't know what the right length should be. And what data do you need to back up a particular date range? The only thing I've found (and I can't find the article now) was a discussion of books on Amazon, and there was a steep drop off of copyrighted books older than 25 years (I think it was they weren't even offered for sale, not that they weren't being purchased)

> You have to factor in movie studios being reluctant to base their works on public domain work because it makes it harder to create a franchise out of it.

Didn't stop the very successful 2009 and 2011 Sherlock movie franchise, or the ongoing very successful BBC Sherlock movie series...

It's also important to remember that an author dying does not prevent him or her from capturing the value. If the copyright survives them, they can sell the rights to someone for a higher price before they die.

I prefer 28-56 because that was the law between 1909 and 1978 and it worked well. That era was extremely productive for artists and profitable for capital. Hollywood and record labels thrived in those years, so we know we can roll back to 28-56 years without harming those industries.

> Would the 1998 Starship Troopers movie have been released based on the 1959 book if copyright had been at its original 14 years?

Certainly, and it might have been made sooner, but not having to pay royalties to create a derivative work would definitely not stop someone from making it.

> How about a lot of the "cult classic" works of today that only became really popular and earned money tens of years after their original release?

These later creations would attract new audiences to the original authors newer works. Its not a void where your public domain creations are gone and no longer influential.

> we'd have the same state of affairs if the incentives we can gave people to create creative works automatically expired after their death.

Can you find any evidence of independent IP creators exclusively working under the pretense of being able to will their IP to descendants for profit?

The vast majority of writers, musicians, photographers - any creative profession - are never in it for money. Because very few people can make money from these professions even with draconian IP, because its a popularity contest. You get one in a thousand that become popular successes, while the rest create out of passion with no expectation of profit. When the vast majority of creative IP is being made without profit motive, obviously copyright terms are uninfluencial upon all those except the successful - it goes as far as the existence of IP hurts the hobbyist creator because they have to navigate a minefield of how derivative their ideas are.

> If you're a smart guy with Robert Heinlein and copyright is more limited to a few years would you ever have written Starship Troopers? Or would you have gone into something like the real estate business which can last generations and keep your children and grandchildren happy & fed after you're long dead?

Uh, you know you still get to keep the money you make, right? Like, we're not going to confiscate any unspent proceeds from a work after the copyright term is up. If you produce a work which is a huge success and makes you rich, then you're still going to be rich.

Let's assume Lord of the Rings was out of term and then a bunch of shoddily made movies got made based on the story and didn't reap much. Would New Line Cinema have laid out the budget for Peter Jackson to make the quality LOTR film trilogy if they didn't have exclusive rights to produce the movies? Those films generated huge amounts of revenue - would we have missed out on that if the books were in the public domain, or would the same revenue have been produced by now with it in the public domain?

The answer is yes. Because Disney did it with Snow White, Cinderella, etc. A more recent example is Tangled--all those stories are derived from public domain characters. Don't even try to make the case that Disney wouldn't have made Tangled if the length of copyright was rolled back to the previous standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_the_RMS_Ti...

You give a director a big budget from their past successes, not necessarily because the underlying thing is somehow easier or harder to make money off of due to copyright. That's icing, not cake.

Great point, or can you imagine Warner Bros. or Miramax taking a bet on a Sherlock Holmes movie without getting exclusive rights? The mere idea is absurd.

I am very sure if someone else even had made the movies, unless they were good, it wouldn't have mattered.

Look at Fox churning out Fantastic Four movies, which are best to say the least about. Copyrights and IP does not necessarily produce a better content for society.

On the contrary, better content does win in the long run.

Yeah what kind of idiot would make a movie about Robin Hood, the Wizard of Oz, or Alice in Wonderland?

Yes, because the story is that good. Look at how many Sherlock Holmes stories are going on right now, and movies are being made. In generally there aren't a ton of "shoddily made movies" surrounding public domain. We don't have lots of John Carters or Wizard of Oz or Sense and Sensibility.

> would we have missed out on that [revenue] if the books were in the public domain..

Why focus on that, instead of (say) the revenue not made by the Silmarillion movies Peter Jackson can't make because the books aren't in the public domain?

...there were pre-existing LOTR movies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(1978_...