Why is it fair? After you are dead, no copyright protection can convince you to write more books. After you are dead, there is no point in protection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/
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.
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.