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Comment by sacrosancty | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit of a broken record on this, but copyright lasting beyond the death of the author is important so that near-death authors can still sell their work. It would be near-worthless to a buyer/publisher/etc. if it was about to enter public domain. Imagine the headline "Famous artist diagnosed with terminal cancer - suddenly can't sell her work to fund her treatment."

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This is why the lifetime of the creator should have nothing to do with copyright terms. All works get a fixed term of 20, 30, whatever years, if the creator dies before that term the rights can be transferred via their estate.

I believe this is the correct answer. And the time frame needs to be shorter than the life of an average person. Personally I think 25 is correct.

The original 14 years plus 14 extra years upon active renewal made sense.

That doesn't just apply to people very close to death. If copyright ended right on death, the the work of someone in their 20's would have twice as long to earn revenue as the work of someone in their 50's. The former's work would still be covered when nostalgia bump came, while the later's work would not. This would create significant financial incentives for publishers/labels/etc to pick up younger artists instead of older ones, in markets that are already skewed towards younger people.

Fixed term makes so much more sense. We should have never signed the Berne Convention.

You could do like 50 years or death of author, whichever comes 2nd. Then an author knows they own their work for life no matter what, but an author near working death still has something to pass on.

This feels very similar to the "think about the children" lines when people want to keep their privacy online. It's stupidly specific, and if you have to twist this far to find an example, I think you have nothing.

I don't think its _stupidly_ specific to point out that people should still be able to sell things when nearing death. But 10/15 years should be more than enough. The amount of years is beyond parody at this point.

David Bowie died two days after his final album was released. Are the people who worked on it, put it out, somehow less entitled to make money because he died?

It doesn't feel overly specific when the topic is copyright after death to think about how people die.

There's two solutions here, either they are co-creators and then all the creators aren't dead or they aren't and they were never going to receive additional revenue beyond their work anyway.

Either way, that's not working as an argument against stopping copyright when the authors are dead.

There's a publisher, who did boring things like pay the cover artist, buy the plastic and vinyl, pay the printer. The record came out, they had a bunch of copies, and then two days later Bowie died. If they're exclusive right to sell they music disappears, they overpaid Bowie.

The cost of publishing a music online after it's been produced is close to zero nowadays. I could see how that argument was relevant 30 years ago though.

And the initial costs are similar to any other non-copyright related work, paid per service.

Because the costs to publish online are zero there would be innumerable other copies of the work posted, meaning the initial outlay for the studio time etc cannot be recouped.

It's exactly like any other work, your plumber doesn't receive royalties whenever you use your bathroom, those costs should be paid upfront.

Yep! The costs to press vinyl and print sleeves and market the work _are_ paid upfront. So cutting off the revenue stream unexpectedly means no more expensive projects for old artists

But it's a plausible situation (terminal/severe illnesses are not that rare) and a relevant argument against the "expire on death" copyright proposal. Laws often need to deal with "stupidly specific" cases because they do happen in the real world.

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