But now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.
~ Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
have never had a prob finding term of copyright on others’ works. There are only 350 billion ideas in the world even if each person had only five each.
I saw copyright as a kind of homestead to hand down to help support an institution or family, with various future health needs, changes in fortune, etc. life time+ seems ok.
Copyright serves a good purpose and the widows and orphans argument is a good rationale for “life-plus” length.
The problem is that too long a term puts the copyright in the hands of people divorced from the original purpose and see it as just a revenue stream, guarding it jealously, often to an extreme.
In the US, at least, copyright is meant to encourage creativity, even if similar to what came before or even derivative, so a balance between too short to encourage and too long is needed. When non-creatives use a copyright to discourage actual creators, it gets iffy. We’re seeing a bit too much of that lately so a somewhat shorter term seems appropriate but, as I said, change is unlikely.
We’ll have to live with what we have.
“Copyrights Can Be Just About a Century Long”
And that’s too long by half to two thirds …
Life plus 30 strikes me as enough to take care of direct descendants, whether because of early death or late parenthood.
I favor 40 years flat. That seems to be roughly the upper limit before things fall apart though death, sale, or indifference.
It’s also easy to track.
The flat copyright limits, even with renewals, produce…odd… results for young people or older titles that suddenly become hot. A lot of Philip K. Dick stories are one example.
People live a long time these days and there is a lot of money in derivative works, especially in corporate circles. As is, people aren’t particularly happy about outfits like Disney making money off centuries old tales and putting their versions under copyright.
Besides, as I said above, trademarks already offer much longer protection (as long as a product is commercially exploited, in fact) so a shorter than life copyright will simply encourage more creators to trademark their characters, worlds, series, etc.
Look at what Edgar Rice Burroughs did. He self published some of his books, trademarked the characters and settings, and built an IP management company to enforce them. So yes, the original stories may be in the PD but anybody looking to exploit them commercially needs a license. (What’s a Tarzan movie worth if you can’tcall him Tarzan? Who would go?)
The Conan Doyle estate is trying to do the same retroactively and, last I heard, they’re still fighting in court over Buck Rogers. (That one is a toss up because while the seminal story is PD, the character is never called that in the novel. Plus the original story has been retold and tweeked so often since that any commercial use of the original would be stomping on the still-protected material.
The key thing advocates of “copyright reform” is that advocating for something that solely benefits non-commercial use is pretty much a lost cause. Too much trouble for little real world gain.
In the examples above, the gain is solely for the relative handful of people interested in hundred year old genre stories. And not much gain per person, at that.
The IdiotPoliticians™ have much more important and pressing matters to ignore.
Fair use for educational purposes?
As bad as American copyright law is — and it is execrable — German law is worse.
Over the past few years I had the pleasure to consult with the crew at The Great War on YouTube. They are based in Berlin and subject to German law.* In order to use a photo or film clip from a hundred years ago, they had to attribute the photographer. Do you know how hard it is to find the name of the photographer who took a picture a hundred years ago? Sometimes it is impossible. Which means that under German law they could not use the picture. No attribution, no use.
* German law is author’s rights masquerading as copyright law.