Betraying Salinger
nymag.com
nymag.com
http://www.thesatirist.com/books/HAPWORTH.html
I also tracked down a copy of the full text, but in the interests of some kind of vague respect for copyright I'll leave you to figure out how to obtain it for yourself.
How long do you think the copyright terms should be? In the case discussed here, we're talking about a work from 1965. You think that everything published before then should be up for grabs?
That is exactly what I want.
> How long do you think the copyright terms should be?
Personally I think 20 years is a reasonable number. The original Copyright Act of 1790 established a term of 14 years with the option of one renewal. Remember that this was in the age of manual printing presses and horse-drawn wagons. In this age of on-demand printing and digital distribution 20 years is more than enough.
The copyright system isn't a right in the sense of speech or assembly, it's a temporary monopoly granted to an author in order to "..promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..". Any aspect of copyright law which fails to promote those goals fails to uphold the constitutional foundation and ultimate purpose of the copyright system.
Copyright law exists in order to encourage authors to create by allowing them to benefit from their creation, but how does allowing a person to collect royalties on something they made 50 years ago promote creativity?
And let's not even talk about all of the books that only became popular more than twenty years after initial publication. Imagine Tolkien in retirement on a modest pension while his books are suddenly bestsellers...
That may be, but remember that this all comes at a cost. Copyright is essentially theft. All art is based upon that past. No one exists in a vacuum and all works are created in a context of deep history and culture that belongs to all of us. When we are denied the right to copy or make derivatives of a work it robs us of part of our culture. People in Afghanistan can legally print and read that Salinger book but we cannot. Is that right?
Tolkien is probably a bad example. I'm pretty sure his main motivation in writing was his exploration with language and not fat royalties. Furthermore, both him and his wife are dead. Why the hell isn't LotR in the public domain?
Let's forget the issue of derivative works for the moment, since that's not what was at stake in the original poster's argument-- we're talking about wholesale copying. And if people in Afghanistan can legally copy a Salinger book without paying him or his publisher, then my beef is with Afghanistan, now with the fact that others can't also rip them off.
How does it rob you of a part of "our culture" if I require that I get paid for any re-publication you do of work that I create?
I'm not saying that LotR shouldn't enter the public domain someday-- but I don't think that 20 years is the right time frame.
Copyright and property are fundamentally different things with different histories and different treatments under the law. Almost all human societies have property or at least a system of possession which excludes others. Copyright is a modern invention.
If I take your car you're out a car, but if I take a song you're singing you don't even have to know.
> How does it rob you of a part of "our culture" if I require that I get paid for any re-publication you do of work that I create?
Have you heard of Google books? It's an incredibly ambitious project where google went and scanned a bunch of library books and put them on the web where they can be searched and read. For works in the public domain you can download the full text of the book and do whatever you want with it. It's like the world's biggest library, except the only books with text are the ones from the 1920s and earlier. Everything else is just a dust jacket.
I've been reading a lot of early 20th century books. When I find a good one I can email my friend a like to a book by Upton Sinclair or H.L. Mencken. But I won't be able to do that for decades with Salinger, if ever.
Creative works don't belong to anyone, but to all of us. We grant artists a temporary monopoly to encourage them. This I can live with, but please lets actually make it temporary.
Why shouldn't LotR be in the public domain? The author is dead. Who is collecting royalties?
History has proven that, past a point, money does not seem to translate into creativeness. Cultures almost always have their most creative periods at times of social and intellectual changes (say, XIX-XX century Germany) and when intellectual work is regarded as prestigious and respected by the public (physics on America post-Einstein/WW2).
If you were a publisher, how much would you be willing to pay an author for the rights to publish a book if you knew you'd be able to publish your own edition of it in ten years anyway? Why would you bother buying rights to new publications at all, if there was more money to be made printing up new editions of the earlier Harry Potter books?
All that authors have to sell is the right to publish their works for the maximum copyright period. If you drastically reduce the maximum copyright period you'll drastically reduce the value of what they're selling, and the effort-to-reward ratio for most authors (even good ones) is, I think, already quite high enough.
I somewhat feel sorry for the authors, but I think they'll manage. Being a writer is already a respected and highly-sought status, even though the pay is poor. Either way, I wouldn't claim copyright durations of ten years. But we can't stay like this eternally.
I do agree, though, that the copyright term should be set sensibly and never changed, and not regularly extended at the behest of Disney. That's a real problem.
Also, thanks for reminding me. I haven't been doing much truly great work lately...it's time to step it up a notch. I sure aint gonna be winning any politeness contests, so the body of work is what matters.
That is certainly a popular notion. Funny how other good authors are also prolific authors.