Whereas book characters from long dead authors are a whole different matter. While I think estates should be able to protect the rights of the estate for a period of time the fact that no new content can be created by the author should discount extending the protection. Now interesting cases do arise where direct descendant or designated authors do keep stories and characters progressing, Dune and Pern come to mind.
So where the association is very strong with an active entitle I say let them keep it, where there are degrees of separation, like book examples, then perhaps one generation?
It's not there to give forever and ever protection. It's there to allow you to get some money before society, which made your product worth something in the first place, can incorporate it into culture where it belonged in the first place.
Disney themselves love using other people stories constantly, but no-one can use theirs for extreme amounts of time because they've distorted the meaning of copyright.
There's no good reason for someone else's ideas to be protected, it doesn't benefit society at all. Copyright should be 10-15 years, not this ridiculous century.
Apart from America as it exports the stuff, so, surprise, surprise, they've bullied the rest of the world into making stupidly long copyrights so that everything created in the last century is languishing in untouchable hell so a few big brands can continue making money off things that should be public domain.
Just because someone disagrees with you, doesn't mean that they don't understand the issue. Your post would have worked just as well without this line.
My personal opinion is that copyright should never expire. Think about it: you can have an indefinite government granted monopoly over land, something you didn't create, something that existed before you and will exist after you, but you have weaker protections over something you brought to life? Something that would not exist without you? To me, the moral case for indefinite copyright protection is stronger than the one for indefinite land ownership.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
Animals are territorial and that's really the end of that.
However, the idea of owning an idea ... that's a legal construct and a very recent one at that. The idea of owning an idea would be entirely foreign to someone a thousand years ago.
And the idea that you have a moral claim on owning an idea is just patently absurd, for a very simple reason.
You have no means of proving one way or another that you were the first person to have that very thought. It is entirely possible someone else had it long before you. What claim to ownership can you have? Because you commercialized the idea first?
Most countries are moving to a "first to file" system to simplify bureaucracy, so now your moral claim is contingent not even on your business acumen, but on your ability to quickly fill out a form.
Artists contribute to world culture. George Lucas may own Star Wars in a narrow technical sense (something something disney, I know), but from a cultural standpoint, he can't take it away. It has become part of our culture, part of our written and visual language. A vast amount of energy and derivative art has been spent enjoying and celebrating Star Wars. It has outgrown the original author, because that is what all human artifacts are: derivatives, copies, reinventions, reimaginations.
If copyright were 40 years, Star Wars would be up in 2017. That's more than enough time.
On the one hand, you do not have a monopoly over land in the sense of copyright. Sure, you control the use of the particular piece of land, but if someone else wants to copy it by reshaping their own land to have the same topography as yours, you have no recourse. Also, if someone wants to make a derivative work, like a map, they are free to do so. In this sense, the land is in the public domain.
On the other hand, you already have indefinite government granted monopoly of creative works in the sense of land ownership. You can write a novel, print it, bind it, and put it in a drawer. As long as you just have the one copy and don't give it to anyone else, the government will protect your right to exclusive usage and ownership of the work. In this sense, the book is protected property like land.
Where the equivalence falls apart is when you want to sell or transfer the property. If you sell your land, you have no say in what the new owners do with it. If you sell a book, you expect to be able to control what the new owners do with it. This is why this comparison is not very useful.
It's interesting that you bring this up, as in many European countries, moral rights of the author are explicitly separate from copyright:
You can assign copyrights, but not moral rights. I believe that distinction stems from France, but I'm familiar with it from Norway, and variations of it is widespread throughout Europe.
For example, you typically have a legal right to have your name on a work, regardless of copyright. You also typically have a legal right to have your name removed from the work if alterations are made that affects the integrity of it, or that may be detrimental to the creators reputation (e.g. imagine someone deciding to alter key sentences in your political treatise to make it mean the opposite of your original), again irrespective of copyright.
So the protection of a creators moral rights does in Europe explicitly not require a wider interpretation of copyright.
Land is a limited, scarce resource. Ideas are infinitely reproducible, mutable, and changeable.
I can copy your words and you've still got them.
Imagine, if you will, that a "corporation" had existed since ancient times that owned the copyrights on all of the Art, Maths, Literature and other intellectual treasures that have enriched humanity as a whole. Do you really want an immortal, gatekeeper entity that could hold back the entire progress of humanity?
Before you claim that supposition as absurd, consider that we now have at least one company that has "existed" since 705 A.D. (1,309 years ago):
Works of art survive because they are reproduced. This is why still-existing older works are so much better, having been heavily selected already.
Given the already ridiculous difficulty in identifying copyright holders in some cases presently, creating an eternal paperwork burden is a sure way to ensure that works become legally unusable, preventing them from being reproduced and ensuring their demise.
But somehow, I think it is impoverishing what's is added to global culture, and in the long term is self-defeating.
Look at the very bottom of this article, the graph about available books by decade. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/25...
The Twentieth Century has a big hole in the middle, because copyright holders tend to stop publishing what is not profitable enough, but do not release their rights just in case, something could put the book back at the forefront.
In the long run, if Mickey Mouse remains the sole property of Walt Disney, it will disappear with the company, while something entering the public domain has much more chance of being revivified. You just have to look to the Sherlock serie. Again, I don't really care for Mickey Mouse specifically. After all, we can't remember everything and some thing will be forgotten in a century or two. But since the law is the same for everyone, there are plenty of works from the 1940's or 1950's that are languishing unpublished, and could have be made available, especially now with the rise of e-books.