Because otherwise, Fitzgerald wouldn't have or have had any incentive to invest in creative work?
(Actually to be fair, I don't think "instead" is quite the right word there.)
Disney have introduced things like single watch video tape (need to be sent back somewhere to be rewound); limited life DVD (special materials, sent in sealed envelope, as soon as it's opened it starts to oxidise); and they still have pretty horrible unskippable trailers and warnings and etc.
That's why they only threw on a few more decades (of course I expect them to go at it again when that extra time runs out) and didn't start that fight much earlier than they did. They still made that stuff after all, even during a time when copyrights were shorter, then they decided to get it raised.
They then slammed the door behind them by repeatedly lobbying for extended copyrights any time their 85 year old Mickey Mouse comes close to being out of copyright.
There's a reason why the copyright extension act is commonly referred to as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
I remember well the original DIVX at Circuit City:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
I honestly think that failure was a huge reason why Circuit City failed. They built up so much ill will from a technically literate audience.
> Flexplay is a trademark for a DVD-compatible optical video disc format with a time-limited (usually 48-hour) playback time. They are often described as "self-destructing" although the disc merely turns black and does not physically disintegrate. The same technology was used by Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment under the name ez-D.
While it's got some silly doublespeak there, the end result is that the DVD actually lets me skip the trailers. I have a lot of other children's movies that I have to mash the "skip" button or even (horror of horrors) have to fast forward the front-matter.
If I make a contract with someone that says I get exclusivity to publish and sell their works, and in return I give them some money, in what way do we need to do copyright assignments?
You don't, and in Germany, there's no such thing as copyright assignment - Urheberrecht is part of the author's moral rights and inalienable[1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Germany#Transf...
Copyright exists for the benefit of society; how does society benefit by being forced to pay the descendants of F. Scott Fitzgerald just to produce copies of his work? Copyright terms were extended after The Great Gatsby was written, so it is entirely bogus to claim that we might not have it without the absurdly long copyright terms we have today.
Let us be honest, it hasn't existed for this purpose for 30+ years. It now exists to protect corporate profit centers and main franchises that big business doesn't want to enter public domain so other people could distribute their work for free and create derivatives without getting sued into oblivion.
The difference between straight labor and creative work is that the artist is, in theory, building an exploitable asset. They only time they get paid directly for their labor (and labor alone) is when they're operating under a work for hire agreement (e.g. a major studio movie).
In this case, the vast armies of cast and crew are just like the RR workers. They clock in, do their day, get paid for that - and only that - then move on to the next job.
It's a rare instance where a capital-intensive creative work (which can include novels when you factor the cost of print runs, distribution, and promotion) don't involve the backers insisting on substantial control. In this sense, it's pretty similar to VCs backing startups.
If the creative talent manages to self-fund and self-distribute, it's not that they're getting paid over and over for one effort. They're commending royalties because they managed to play several roles at once.
How are laborers not building an exploitable asset? When last I checked, that is exactly what they do: they build exploitable assets for others.
Really, it sounds like you are arguing that Fitzgerald's publisher should be able to charge for his work in perpetuity.
Of course, an intelligent reader would have been able to infer that's exactly simply by reading the very next line. And because this is HN, I don't make a habit of dumbing-down the discourse to a third grade level. But hey, I'm not afraid to be servicy, so if spoon-feeding is what you need, well, there you go.
And now that I've discovered that reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, I can understand why a subtle detail like the distinction between "rent" and "royalties" (which I was careful to make) would have sailed straight over your head. So where more diligent readers would register my acknowledgement of the differences between tangible and intangible assets and by extension, my awareness of the distinct sets of laws that pertain to each, you turned a comprehension failure on your part into an deliberate oversight on mine, before misconstruing your own error as open advocacy on my part for an end to term limits on copyrights.
To which all I can say is...riiight.
Well, OK. That just proves he didn't need 70 to "forever less one day" in order to write it.
But the evidence is strongly on the side that he needed at least 50 years. I mean, did you see him writing Gatsby before the 1909 copyright act? No, you didn't, because before that, he'd have somewhere around 40 piddling years of copyright protection. But the 1909 act passes and sure enough, Gatsby comes out less than 15 years later.
Is my sarcasm detector off? Or are you just a really bizarre troll?
If you have any sources about Fitzgerald's take on copyright terms I would love to read them, but without that you have absolutely no basis with which to say that there is "strong evidence" that he required more than 50 years.
I'll also point out that it's hard to write about the roaring '20s before the Copyright act of 1909.
Through Copyright, All Things Are Possible!
Hail Copyright!
Yep. It's almost as if such an argument would be too absurd to take seriously.
2) Copyright as it was when the book was written: It allowed for works to be copyrighted for a period of 28 years from the date of publication. Like the Copyright Act of 1790 before it, the copyrighted work could be renewed once for a second term of equal value.
but really, it's the publisher that needs the incentive to invest in fitzgerald's creative work that copyright is about here, yeah?
Looking at it this way, I'm thinking that paid copyright renewals are the right way to go. Have the initial copyright last maybe 10 years, then require the rights holder to pay a small fee (something like $50, maybe?) to renew the copyright for another decade. If a work isn't making the author at least $5 a year, it probably belongs in the public domain.
In any case, the fact that there is a deep-pocketed rights holder for those works means that those works are being cared for, to some degree at least. The ones we really have to worry about right now are those that are lost and forgotten before their copyright expires.
Remember that when you go into a big chain bookstore, all the books you are seeing have already outperformed most by getting shelved by a major retailer.