The difference to patents is that they're routinely abused. Patent trolls file or buy up patents that are as general as possible to drag smaller companies through the courts, or charge exorbitant licensing fees, stifling innovation. Pharma companies build monopolies around life-saving drugs and engage in price gouging. The patent holders get rich, not the biochem majors. Extending the effective period for patents will make things worse, not better, as the real problems are elsewhere.
There's fan fiction of almost every character you can imagine. Can you name even ONE fan fiction you'd rather consume instead of the original author's work?
The reason copyright was invented in the first place was to encourage creative work by allowing the creator to profit from it for a period. It aims to balance potential benefits—the one that accrues to the creator and the one that accrues to the general population once copyright expires. You might think that the creator does not deserve any benefit from their creation, but most creators would disagree with you.
Code is a possible exception. The benefits of open source development may greatly outweight the benefits that would accrue to an individual developer if the code couldn't be copied, but I'm not sure that the balance is the same for novels and movies. I suspect many valuable creative works would simply not be created if the creator had no way to benefit.
Perhaps we need a more nuanced discussion that considers the actual benefits/harms of copyright periods on particular artforms and creative endeavours.
you think people idolize sports figures because of copyright?
My major gripe is with software patents which are already covered by copyright.
20 years seems like a sufficient term, I would even go for 10 or 15. Creators were still creating before copyright terms were extended to infinity.
The argument is actually that copyright encourages more public works without regard to quality.
Copyright should be for a fixed number of years so that everyone receives equal benefit and that time period should be closer to 10-20 years rather than a hundred.
Your argument is a straw man. Why should author's have a different right to provide for their children more so than other professions?
There's something inherently unjust in protecting the works based on the death of the original author. A 25 year old will, on average, enjoy a significantly longer period of protection than a 75 year old.
The book sells a million copies and the publisher refuses to pay the widow and child anything because the work is now in the public domain. Justice has been done?
I think a simple period of time, like 7 or 14 years, or even 50, makes more sense.
Most pension systems only allow minimal contributions to third party's about £3.6k in the UK and the USA's 401 system is to be blunt a bit crap.
What you are saying is that all of the benefit goes to the publishing company, not the public. Not really.
The reality of normal people is that a big part of the reason they work is in order to provide for the people they love. This is why copyright exists in the first place—to protect the motivation to produce creative work, knowing that the benefit won’t be stolen from you. Knowing that if you die, the benefit to your children is immediately forfeit actually reduces the willingness for people who aren’t misanthropes to take on that risk.
In regards to your example, the publisher has a contractual obligation with the author, which is obviously part of the estate.
My argument is that even if the author has a deal with a publisher for a particular book, that should not prevent others from being able to create new books, movies, games, etc based on that book.
As a counter example, imagine a 25 year old, with a wife, who would have been able to create the best game ever in 2010. Unfortunately he dies in 2015.
The game would have sold millions of copies if it was published, but unfortunately the character of Mickey Mouse is integral to it, so because of copyright the game cannot be made until 2024 - 58 years after Walt Disney's death and 96 years after the first appearance of the character.
I'm pretty sure that people from other professions can leave their property to their children as well, and that property does not suddenly become a public good a set amount of time afterwards.
but I guess in whatever wonderful country you live in there are no such things as landlords, or perhaps its a dystopian hellhole because there isn't any government enforced property rights so warlords just grab whatever real estate they want? Just trying to get my head around this analogy you were making.
on edit: I see you completely changed your comment from being an example with real estate to being something with Levi's.
> The way that design elements are cut and pieced together is not protected by copyright. The U.S. Supreme Court recently addressed this topic in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, stating that copyright affords “no right to prohibit any person from manufacturing [clothing] of identical shape, cut, and dimensions.”
Levi's in particular has distinct cuts that they are famous for. Should we start embedding RFID tags in jeans to collect licensing fees every time you wear them in public?
I'm sorry but are you under the impression that everything an author does is covered by copyright, that is to say there is nothing an author does that they will be unable to copyright?
on edit: at any rate Levi's cuts etc. are trademarked https://iptica.com/register-clothing-brand/levi-patents/
Unless copyright holders are somehow prohibited from obtaining property or passing it on to their relatives I don't think that's a meaningful comparison
it should be relatively clear, copyrighted works are a form of property that people have and pay taxes on, the same way that they pay taxes on stock they own, or the improvements they did to their land when they built a house on it, and so forth. It's all a form of property.
>they can use that income to acquire things like property
yes, if a master carpenter makes a table and never sells it they can pass it on to their children as a form of property. but they can also sell it and use the money to obtain other forms of property and pass that on to their children. Or just let them inherit the money. Not sure what the point here is, except that for a lot of people's arguments to work here it is beneficial to ignore that copyrighted works are also a form of property.
Now someone will make the point that written works don't work the same as a table made by a carpenter and therefore it is unfair, even though stocks and bonds do not work the same as a small family mom and pop store which does not work the same as a table made by a carpenter which does not work the same as a painting by a famous painter which does not work exactly the same as the insurance business, and so on and so forth.
The fact is that there are many forms of business and property and they do not all work exactly the same, although their local differences tend to get smoothed out by the effects of accounting.
Obviously part of the way that the writing business works is formed by the laws and regulations pertaining to it. You would like to change that, but it seems disingenuous to argue that it should be changed because copyrighted works are not property. They function like property now that the owners lose after a variable amount of time, and even if the changes you wanted would be put in place they would still function like property - but with much less time before being changed to a public good.
And TBH with all due respect trotting out rhetorical devices like "straw man" does sound like sealioning.
It should last maybe several years, and that's it. Only then most people would have any semblance of respect for it. And then something entering the public domain would be actually an event people would be looking forward to. Right now everyone considers copyright to be an effectively eternal thing.
It's also really depressing that the entirety of our pop culture is copyrighted, mostly by large faceless corporations.
But if those faceless corporations hadn't paid for our pop culture to be produced and distributed, it wouldn't exist.
You are young aspiring author. You have a family. You publish a greatly successful novel/series which would bring you $10M annually for at least 30 years.
You and your SO die in a car crash. Your children, 3 and 5 y.o. now without a parents.. and without ANY part of that probable $300M. Good luck, children, you did nothing at all.
On top of that, many people enjoy giving back, either to their kids or community. Preparing nice things for people after your death can bring comfort in life. That may come in the form of money, open sourced code, etc.
I'm looking forward to all that life extension/rejuvenation research that's gaining momentum right now. I don't want to die. Ever. I wish I could contribute to it, but my skill set isn't very fitting for this purpose. I doubt any one of the companies doing this kind of research needs a screaming fast android app or a java backend.
Personally I think copyright should be 25 years. And not the life and then some. But that 25 years should extend past the life of the creator. Plus I don't want to create any motives to do away with the creators
Software patents cover the invention. Software copyright (presumably) cannot cover software that has not been created yet.