Presumably this will encourage the creator of the 1914 work to create new works.
The intellectual commons has been (and is), literally, subject to "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." scenarios. That shouldn't have ever been acceptable. Since no "normie" has ever given a damn about copyright terms only those who were financially incented to care (read: holders of copyrights) got a say. They used their lobby to make the change happen.
If so, that law was unconstitutional:
"[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
It totally won't enable over a hundred years of rent seeking for him, descendants who could inherit his property after he's dead and of course the monopolistic copyright giants.
I, on the other hand, am alive and would definitely have decided to become a world-renowned operatic singer, if only copyright wasn't so short that I couldn't pass on the rights to my artistic creations to my children's children's children's children's children's children's children. I could pass it on to my children's children's children's children's children's children, but I worry about their kids. Copyright isn't sufficiently long enough for that so I decided to produce no art at all instead, and become an engineer to produce trade secrets that can last indefinitely.
We definitely need an extension to copyright to incentivize long-term planners like me to create more art.
/s
and can also be invalidated immediately. AFAIK trade secret gets no formal protection outside secrecy.
Corporations can persist beyond the life of any humans within them for a good reason. It enables longer term investment and decision making to achieve things that can't be done in a single lifespan. Why should human lifespan be some essential time limit on property rights?
It also has the ethical problem that old or unhealthy people's work would be worth less than young healthy people's.
Neither scenario is testable. It ends up being a question of the kind of world you want to live in-- one where the estates of the dead lock up artifacts of culture and don't allow them to be used to create new works or one where new works based on older works can be more freely created.
Have you seen "Wicked" (or read the novels upon which it is based, or listened to the soundtrack, or purchased branded merch)? Have you read "The Last Ringbearer"? One of those works exists commercially and as a broad cultural phenomenon because expiration of copyright allowed it to. The other won't see a commercial release until at least 2043 because the estate of a dead man says it can't.
The success of Disney in "monetizing" and influencing culture with public domain stories makes me think there's significant validity in the argument of allowing old works to enter the public domain more quickly so they can be freely built-upon. It seems like both an economic and cultural good.
"Wicked" has probably done a lot more business than the estate of L. Frank Baum was going to in the early 2000s using the "The Wizard of Oz" properties.
The median planning term for US corporations is far closer (even on a log scale) to one quarter than to one century. It's offensive to even suggest that any major US corporation is planning multiple human generations into the future, except, ironically, to be able to exploit their current IP holdings ad infinitum. Completely detached from reality, like most pro-IP arguments.
What was the last movie you've watched that entered the public domain? I bet not a single person on this site will see that happen within their lifetimes.
The fact is copyright monopolists have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
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).
Copyright term duration is about society. The truth is copyright is bullshit. Artificial scarcity is exactly that: artificial. It's a lie. Society is doing creators a huge favor: we're all pretending the creator's works are scarce. We're pretending we don't know how to make copies. We do this so that they can make money from their work. And we're doing it with the understanding that after a while the work will belong to us all. It will no longer be the creator's, it will become part of our culture by joining the public domain. Public property.
The longer you make those terms, the more unfair it is to the society that enabled the creator's business in the first place. The more unfair it is, the less reason there is to uphold the original social contract.
This arrangement must be tolerable for society. This eternal rent-seeking monopoly bullshit will not be tolerated. One day society is going to stop pretending and these monopolists will understand that everything is public domain.
It's already happening. See Sci-Hub.
My point is that copyright is to incentivize authors to produce work but if it's limited by the author's lifetime, then older people will be incentivized less than younger people because they won't be able to sell the rights for as much money because they'll expire sooner. We don't particularly need work created by young people more than old people, so why incentivize it that way?
> Money also has artificial scarcity
I don't understand. Why do you think that?
I don't think this can be called artificial scarcity though. It's real scarcity that's gradually inflated away by governments and banks. Data is already infinitely abundant as soon as it's created.