I am a film-maker. I create copywrighted works of art. I am opposed to anything but brief (fourteen years or so) copyright terms.
Just because you want something, yosemitebabe, doesn’t mean that you should get it. You want to retain exclusive control of your images into perpetuity. I want knee-high elves to serve me cheese and fruit in the afternoon. There are other interests in the world besides your own.
The purpose of copywright is to promote the useful arts. In other words, it is to encourage people to make more, better, art. It is not to protect any percieved “rights” regarding the control of your work. It is soley a means to an end. The sad truth is you have no natural right to any work that you put out in the public. That is just the way things are. Something isn’t a right just because you really really want it to be. Work released to the public ultimately belongs to the public. The only way to prevent that is to keep work in the private sphere. You may think that sucks, but you are not the most important thing in the world. You have the right not to be enslaved, but you do not have any particualar right to profit from anything you feel that you should be profiting from.
Very few producers of intellectual property are likley to outright stop producing work if they cannot hold the rights into perpetuity. Extreme copyright lengths will not produce more, better art. However, releasing work into the public domain does.
How many theater troups rely on public-domain stories because they cannot afford royalties for protected works? If theater troupes did not have access to public domain works, we’d see a lot less creativity and vitality in the world of theater, especially on a community and educational level. The same goes with film. Adaptations can make for some very really excellent films (For example, I just saw Julie Taymore’s Titus). A friend of mine recently did a feminist retelling of Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” that was took the ideas from the origional story and reworked them to bring up some interesting issues. These works are not simply riding on someone else’s acheivment. They are works in their own right that enrich our cultural and artistic heritage that would not be possible without the public domain.
I’ve already argued that philisophically, work ultimately belongs to the society that it came from. Art can and should enrich the entire world, not just one person. Whatever system leads to the greatest enrichment of society through art is the system that I support.
You cannot copyright an idea. You copyright your interpretation of that idea. If Joe Blow down the road likes your idea and wants to copy your photo/re-interpret your characters/re-write your book so it has the ending he likes, well he can’t do it. And tough titties to him!
However he can write a book/take a photo/create a universe where things go the way that please him.
I’ve never for one microsecond considered my creativity stifled because I can’t re-write someone else’s intellectual property. I can take an idea and re-work it. So can everyone else.
Unless people really are arguing that it is more creative to rip characters from BtVS or HP than to write their own works? Works which can include characters at a wizard school or who are vampires.
I suppose all those Renaissance artists were just lazy uncreative slobs. Surely they could have come up with their own stories instead of painting a bunch of rehased crap from the bible.
There comes a point when a story, set of characters, image or whatever becomes a part of the culture as a whole. Using these things in your own art is no more uncreative than using any other concept from one’s culture.
It’s not uncreative of me to want my characters to sing “Happy Birthday” around the birthday cake in my movie, just as it is not uncreative of me to have them say the 23rd psalm a a funeral. “Happy Birthday” is a part of our world. It is a part of our background. It is a part of all of us. Using it is relflecting reality. My work would suffer if they had to sing my own version of the Chevy’s Happy Birthday Song before they blew out the candles. Part of living in America is singing “Happy Birthday”, and it is ridiculous that something that is so much a part of our memories and consciousness can’t be used in my movie.
Hello, U.S. Copyright law specifies seventy years after the copyright claimant’s death, not ninety.
Yes, I know, which is why the Twain example was hypothetical. Currently copyright’s are originator’s death + 70 years, but there is talk of raising it to 90 years as a result of the Disney lobbying for copyright extension.
Disney didn’t invent those stories or characters, they remade existing works that had fallen into the public domain (back when copyright terms were much shorter). Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do the same with original Disney stories?
Too bad we’ll all be dead by the time that can happen.
Disny have only copyrighted their version of the Little Mermaid etc though haven’t they? They haven’t copyrighted the general concept? While I’m not defending Disney, I can see a slippery slope if the law distinguishes between private authors and ‘products’ such as Disney. I honestly don’t see why people think they have a right to rework the concepts of others in the name of creativity.
EVEN SVEN
you can use happy birthday. Pay the licensing fee and you’re sweet. But I suspect you already know that.
I think Blalron’s suggestion is the best solution I’ve heard so far. It promotes the creation of art throughout an artist’s entire lifetime, but also allows art to enter the public domain within a reasonably short amount of time.
The world doesn’t revolve soley around your personal interests. And your particular situation with some old photographs that anyone could replicate today quite easily doesn’t need super duper extra protection.
What I was thinking of was very unique photographs that show historical moments in time. Such as photos of the World Trade Center collapsing, or of World War II, or the Kennedy Assasination, or showing homeless people in the soup lines during the Great Depression.
Hoarding the rights to those photos as cash cows for extremely long periods of time is NOT in the best interests of society, or the promotion of the usefull arts. And just because by accident of birth you had a father or grandfather or great-grandfather who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right kind of camera doesn’t mean that you and your descendents should rake in money forever and ever and ever at the expense of the rest of society!
Indeed. Although you can’t make a derivative work based on Disney’s version of the Little Mermaid, you can make your own movie based on the original fairy tale.
Then, of course, you can try to dodge the lawsuits from Disney alleging that your version is too close to theirs.
I don’t see why people think they own a concept simply because they were the first to record it.
I can come up with an “original concept” in a few minutes by putting different colored beads on a string in an original pattern. If I use enough beads and enough different colors, it’s very likely that no one has ever strung beads like this before. But it’s ridiculous to claim that I deserve some kind of ownership over this pattern of bead-stringing!
Whether it’s been done before or not, someone else could later come up with the same “concept” independently. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with the idea of putting beads on a string–or the idea of making a movie about a mermaid who wants to be human.
Ideas belong to everybody. Where would we be as a society if we couldn’t perform or produce anything that was influenced by anything else created in the past 100 years?
You see that’s probably where I just Do Not Get It. My SO makes a living out of writing children’s books. He’s reasonably well known and is a professional writer. He’s certainly influenced by other writers and has influenced others in his turn.
And you know what? In our daily lives as writers, the issues of other people’s copyrights has never been an issue. Never. Mr P has spent time working on a feminist fairytale. It’s not finished or sold yet but when it is and it does, I can assure you copyright infringement will not be an issue. Because it will be a stand alone work with original ideas which is sufficiently different to work that other people have done. Bingo! No copyright infringement!
I don’t live in this world where ideas are copyrighted. Can anyone find me a cite where the copyrighting of ideas is proven?
The thing is, I do get exclusive rights to my own drawings and photos until my death, and then my heirs get the rights to them 70 years past that. I could handle 35 - 50 years past my death, but as it stands now, it’s 70.
I DO get those rights. I already have them. You want them taken away. Just because you want them taken away doesn’t mean that it will happen.
I am not suggesting that my general idea about Half Dome at Sunset should be protected—it’s a basic concept, and everyone is free to interpret Half Dome at Sunset however they wish. They just have to go to Yosemite and wait until sunset and voilà—there you go.
I just want a say-so over what can be done with the actual negative I took of Half Dome at Sunset. If you want to use my picture of Half Dome at Sunset, well then, you can contact me and pay me a fee and you can use the picture. Or not. But you just can’t take it. Just like I can’t take clips from your films without asking you first.
And how is my insistence that you get your own picture of Half Dome (or pay me for my effort legwork, since I took the trouble to take the picture myself) impede that? I do not flatter myself that my work is so fantastic that you couldn’t find another alternative to it, anyway. With a little creative ingenuity, you certainly could.
Please explain this.
It becomes part of the public in the sense that they see it, they comment on it, they can use parts of my work in the “fair use” context, they can display copies that they’ve bought of my work on their walls, and so on. But a publishing company can’t just publish my work without my consent, and make a profit from it. They can’t put my Half Dome picture on t-shirts and mugs and sell them without my consent. Isn’t that just terrible? :rolleyes:
It is true, I can’t physically stop people from STEALING my work, but it does not change the fact that they have no legal right to.
And neither are the people who want to put my photos on t-shirts and mugs without asking my permission, and/or paying me a fee. Just because they want to use someone else’s work for their profit does not mean that they are automatically entitled to do so.
Now, this makes no sense.
This is how many people make their LIVING. No where do I get the impression that freelance photographers, artists or writers are not entitled to profit from their own work after a certain limited amount of time. Some photographers are still profiting from photos that they took 40 years ago. And you want to prevent these people from doing this? You want to suggest that once a photographer releases their work to the public, then they have no moral right to control how it is used? But it simply does not work this way, and thankfully, probably never will.
Yes, that’s fine and dandy, and isn’t it fantastic that all these things do eventually go to the public domain? But if your friend didn’t have something to re-do, she’d have to come up with something on her own, wouldn’t she? Why is that so terrible to contemplate?
It depends on what you mean by “influenced”. That’s a very fuzzy term. Many people say that composer John Williams was “influenced” by Stravinsky and the like. But no one is suing Williams for ripping off Stravinsky, because the “influence” is general in nature. However, if Williams did a very recognizable rendition of “Rite of Spring” and claimed it as his own, then that would be a problem.
I can do a picture that is “influenced” by the moody look of several different photographs by other photographers. That’s not a problem unless a photographer can point to one picture and say, “See, you copied this one picture a little too closely, and it is instantly recognizable.” If I don’t do that, but merely use their work as a springboard for my own concepts and ideas, then I haven’t really ripped the photographers off, I have been just “influenced” by them.
Agreed! 100% agreed.
True, there are times when I have to look at “scrap” or source photos to get an idea for a painting, but I change and interpret these source photos so much so that they are no longer recognizable. No copyright infringment.
My own photos are my own photos. I went out in the field, took my OWN photos, and wow! They are mine! Certainly everyone else can bestir themselves to go out and take their own photographs. My drawings are my own drawings. I drew from life, from my imagination, or from my own photographs. Any other artist can do the same thing, and wait! They do. All the time. No worries about copyright infringment there either.
A few other random thoughts that I keep on forgetting to add:
I don’t really have a problem with fans exchanging files or books or copies of artwork amongst themselves. There is a huge difference (in my mind, anyway) between a few fans exchanging hard-to-find files or copies amongst themselves, and a publisher taking someone’s work out from under them and distributing it (for profit, especially) without the artist’s consent.
On my photos site, I have written in my “terms of use” page that individuals are free to download and print out any of my photos. They can transfer my photos to t-shirts, or for their walls, or whatever, that’s fine with me. (And I’ve gotten emails from people who have enjoyed doing that.) I just don’t want them publishing or displaying my work without my consent, especially if they don’t intend to at least give me credit (and many won’t). And if they feel entitled to profit from my work? No, they are not entitled to that either.
Since I’ve done some “fan art” in the past, I don’t think it’s so terrible, unless the artist starts selling prints and is trying to make a profit. Most fan art is done for love, and is very low profile.
The thing that is a problem in my mind are the people who don’t want to hire a freelancer, and don’t want to buy the royalty free CDs that are in abundance, but want to just TAKE the stuff, and make a profit from it, and feel that they are entitled to do so for some reason. And I am glad that copyright laws forbid them from doing that.
Exploit the works of others? So Shakespeare exploited the works of others when he wrote Hamlet? Excuse me, but that’s bullshit.
Shakespeare rewrote stories that the public was already familiar with. Do none of you realize how powerful a device that can be?
The Elizabethan public was familiar with the story of Hamlet, just as today we are all familiar with the story of Superman. Shakespeare not only created a beautiful adaptation of the story, considered by many to be the greatest work written in English, but he also played with the public’s preconceptions of the story.
Don’t try to tell me that that couldn’t be done again today.
It’s not a “romantic” hope. It has happened before. It will happen again.
But if you really want to discuss the economics of copyrights instead of the artistic implications, fine. The economics of the situation are simple: A copyright should last long enough to provide enough of an incentive so that artists will continue to create works. We’ve had some numbers on this, and I believe that’s about ten years, maybe less. A copyright is a type of monopoly (market inefficiency, anyone?), so it should last the absolute minimum amount of time necessary.
But artistically, let’s face it. It should last longer than that. But not too long! I’d be thrilled if the rule were thirty years or the death of the author, whichever comes last.
But when the copyright lasts so long that children from the next generation grow old and die before the copyright runs out, something is off. It’s economically inefficient, it’s artistically stifling, and it’s wrong.
Well, the idea of the thread is that we’re discussing whether this is too long. And it’s way too long. In addition to the fact that it’s a monopoly (for you), and a curb on freedom of speech (for me), there are all kinds of societal costs.
If I download a copy of one of your photographs from the internet and use it for my Christmas cards this year, the government will spend time and money to arrest, try, and imprison me. If my grandson in 2071 prints up those same Christmas cards, they’ll do the same to him. In fact, the government is going to be on a high holy vendetta for the next n years to make sure every single copy of one of your photographs has documented proof that you or your heirs approved its existence. They’ll arrest people who sell Playstation mod chips, because who knows? The DMCA extends the legal burden of copyright from publishers onto individual viewers of creative works and onto the technology industry. Playstation mod chips might conceivably be used to infringe your copyright.
Copyright enforcement is folded into law enforcement and international relations, so we’ll use guns and the military and economic sanctions and the threat of death to enforce copyright when necessary.
A lot of posts to this thread have pooh-poohed the fact that copyright restricts derivative works with “well just take your own pictures/make up your own stories/etc.” arguments. And whatever. You may not personally have a lot of respect for art that directly incorporates other works, but it is a legitimate type of creative expression, and it does get burdened because of copyright. Maybe you don’t run into that cost very often if you write children’s books or take photographs of natural monuments. But I bet you run into it all the time if you’re a jazz musician.
Another cost of copyright is the fact that we lose art to it. Yosemitebabe, if your heirs decide that it’s just too much work to keep making prints of your photographs, then that’s it. They’re gone. They won’t appear in a new compilation of photographs, and future generations won’t see them for the next seventy years. This is the situation that most published writing from the twentieth century is in – publishers hold the copyright but don’t see any value in publication, so it’s simply not available. Or nobody’s quite sure who owns the copyright any more, and so nobody dares publish it.
So once you publish your photograph, our society is going to take on the burden of enforcing copyright for it. And it’s not a small burden, especially when you consider that we do it for every creative work ever released. But we do it as a reward for your artistic statement, and to encourage you to make it available to the public.
And, you know, 95 years or life plus 70 years is just too long. Terms that long benefit a very small number of high-profile works. Gone with the Wind, Steamboat Willie, Happy Birthday. Almost all other creative works, and society in general, are paying huge amounts in order to reward the heirs of the creators of those works. And it’s wrong. The creators of those works have been handsomely rewarded by our society, and it’s time for us to stop piling cost after cost upon ourselves in order to continue rewarding them.
:rolleyes: No, actually, in my case people are already downloading my pictures and using them on t-shirts and the like, with my full permission. I have no objections to such a practice.
And do you seriously believe that anyone actually arrests someone for printing out a few Christmas cards? What kind of melodramatic haze are you living in?
If I am not mistaken, one of the things the courts decide when these kind of issues come up is what kind of monetary damages are incurred by copyright violation. You print out my pictures for a few Christmas cards? How much in “damages” would I get? A few bucks? Not even worth going to court for.
What? The government really doesn’t do much of anything, as far as I know. I would be the one on the look-out, not the government.
In every copyright case I’ve heard of (which I admit, is just my own observation) it’s always the copyright holder that brings the subject to the attention of the government. Not the other way around. Unless there is some massive government agency hidden away somewhere that is assigned the arduous task of monitoring every creative work ever made. Are you claiming this? Have any cites to back it up?
Oh what a hoot you are! Very amusing, very amusing…
And we lose art to it ANYWAY! Not every piece of artwork created is released to the public. Not every person wants to bother.
Also, my dad’s photographs wouldn’t be released to the public if copyright laws were changed in the way that you would prefer, because I wouldn’t bestir myself to process them myself, just so other people could profit off of them. I hate to break it to you, but just because someone produces a creative work, it does not follow that they are automatically obligated to have it released to the public. And even if they do have it released to the public once (let’s say, on a very small scale), I see no reason why they are obligated to continue to allow it to be released, if that was never their wish or intention.
They can always be persuaded to sell rights to the photographs and let someone else do all the work. It is done all the time.
And as far as I’m concerned, this time can be diminished to 35 - 50 years. But, like I said, if my heirs are involved in the welfare of my images, (and are bound to benefit financially from them) then darn tootin’ they’ll be allowing them to be released to the public. What’s the point of owning rights to something and not getting something out of it? Unless they have some sort of moral or ethical reason for withholding the works (like my friend who joined the crackpot religion). In which case, sorry, but that’s their right, to withhold the work. It may be a bummer, but if they have a moral objection? ::Shrug:: That’s too bad for the rest of us, I guess. I don’t believe in tromping on someone else’s moral sensibilities.
That’s a shame, but hasn’t anyone tried to contact the heirs of the author? Do they just sit on their hands and do nothing, rather than take the initiative? And if they truly do feel like they can do NOTHING because the heirs cannot be reached, then I would support some sort of exception or petition be allowed, so that abandoned works be allowed to be pushed into public domain sooner. But if there are heirs that are actively involved in the wellfare of the works, then I don’t see why they should be cut out of the process.
You know, you say this is if it automatically is. But that hasn’t been my experience at all. Most of the time, it is the copyright holder who discovers copyright violations and tries to enforce their own copyright. At least that’s how it’s been in my case. I’ve had a few people violate my copyright on the web, and in all cases, I’m the one making the stink to stop them, and no one else.
Also, just recently I signed up for a cafepress account (where you can get your images on t-shirts and mugs, etc.). Cafepress insists that you agree that you have not violated anyone’s copyright, but this is mostly on the honor system. I could steal someone else’s images with ease, publish them via Cafe Press, and from what I could tell, as long as no one turned me in, I could still do it. I don’t believe for a second that the government is hovering over CafePress’s shoulder, making sure that no copyright is violated.
I agree, in some of these cases, it seems too long. And I have already said, I’d support cutting the time down to 35 to 50 years. But as I’ve already repeated, if I died soon after creating some work that my heirs had significantly helped contribute to, then I want them to profit from it.
And in the case of one of my friends, an old-timer television writer, well, I am glad she’s still getting residual checks (modest though they are) from her writing from the '60s. Do you want to take this away from her? She’s had a few devastating health set-backs, including approx. a decade of writer’s block brought on by severe depression. She only recently started writing again, and I don’t know if she’ll ever write for TV again (it being such a fickle medium). So why should the television stations and networks profit from her work (by selling advertising to show the programs she wrote) and yet she get nothing?
You always mention the big profit-making examples of copyright “monopolies”, but what about the run-of-the mill small fry, like my writer friend, or the freelance photographers who make their living selling their lifetime’s worth of photos? Do you want to take that all away from them? Just so that the bigger, more powerful companies who have clout and financial backup can swoop in and publish the work or sell advertising to broadcast it, while the people who actually MADE it get nothing?
What if the Zapruder family decided to NEVER make available their film of the Kennedy assasination? I don’t know when Abraham Zapruder died, but assuming it was just after the assasination, the American Public would have to wait until 2033 to see it.
In that case, would you honestly say you believe that the right of copyright holders to horde important parts of history outweigh the right of the Public to see it?
They may not arrest you for christmas cards, but the do want to arrest you for a couple of songs. They will shut you down for putting up a web site with seventy-year-old out-of-print books on it. They will try to decide what kind of electronic equiptment your allowed to manufacture, and what kind of software you are allowed to write. The effects of copyright law streach far beyond your web site, and somehow I don’t think the people that are making all these laws are all that concerned with you and your photos.
You do realize that nothing will enter the public domain for another twenty years unless it is specifically released that way (and maybe not even then, as the friction that the free-software movement is running against shows)? I’ll be forty-two! I’ll likely have grown kids before we get anything new in the public domain. This isn’t a matter of losing a couple photographs. This is the fact that our public world is going to be at an artistic standstill- potentially forever. My kids may not know what it is like to see something in the public domain that isn’t older than their great-grandmother is. Their high school may never get to perform some of the great theatrical works of the twentieth century. They will not be able to read the great works of the last century online just so that they can better themselves. Chances are they will never get to play the video games that I play, because once a video game goes out of print it is unlikely to ever be revised. Our kids won’t ever play SimCity. They won’t know what Doom is like. We are going to pretty much lose the media and pop culture of the recent past. That is a tragety. The future is going to live a far less rich life than we do.
I have no faith that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extention act will be the last of it. Major corporations want copyright to last forever so that they do not have to innovate or change their business practices, and since they have such a stranglehold on congress, they pretty much get what they want.
If your heirs have contributed that signifigantly, you can go down to the county office and fill out a couple of forms and you’ll have yourself a little business with the rights to that property owned by the business for a reasonable amount of time. Thats how most artists involved in collaborative works (well, in film at least) do it.
It’s not like I like the idea of taking money out of the hands of little old ladies or anything…but isn’t that a better argument for universal healthcare or something? Forty years ago, my grandfather build a stairway in a skyscraper. He certainly doesn’t get any checks in the mail every time someone walks up that stairway. He doesn’t expect congress to pass borderline unconstituional laws giving him control of that staircase until seventy years after his death. He has to do what everyone else has to do- keep working and plan for his retirement. I’m sorry your friend had some bad breaks, choes her career poorly and didn’t plan for her old age. But that happens to people around the world every freaking day and while it is tragic, destroying the artistic culture and hertitage of our country is no way to rectify that.
Okay, I probably wouldn’t be arrested for printing some christmas cards on my inkjet printer, but I bet if you got a factory and printed up a few hundred thousand of them to sell on the black market you’d be facing the business end of our law enforcement system. Especially if by “christmas cards” you mean “copies of Windows XP.”
My point is, even if the way the law is enforced today is often fairly benign (copyright holder files a civil suit seeking monetary damages), it isn’t always this way. People do go to prison, cd factories do get raided, and we do enact embargoes against nations that do an inadequate job of copyright enforcement. The fact that it’s inefficient to “monitor every creative work ever made” doesn’t mean that we would never do so. Congress was debating the SSSCA this year, which would require all electronic devices to contain copyright enforcement technology.
In the end, copyright is a law just like any other law. It does get enforced. Limiting the terms of copyright just means that at some point we stop enforcing that law for a particular work. It could mean in some cases that a greedy fatcat S.O.B. starts publishing and making money from something that an independent artist released, which is a shame. But it could also mean that an independent theater could now afford to show some old mickey mouse cartoons before their movies.
If a company is in the business of holding copyrights, each work they own the rights to is an asset. But they may not be actively using all of their assets all of the time. Sometimes for no good reason. Publishers don’t see it as a good investment to print & publicize old books that may not sell many copies. Or maybe they don’t want to have older works competing with their newer catalog. Or whatever, but it does happen, and that’s another cost of copyright.
What’s interesting here, yosemitebabe, is that I’m not sure we actually disagree on the end result – we’d both be happy with shorter copyright terms. It sounds like you’d be willing to tolerate them, and I’d actively welcome them.
Terms that wildly exceed the life of the creator are pretty clearly intended to help the big faceless publishing conglomerates more than the independent artist and their family. So I wouldn’t want to take things away from you or the people you know: I’d like to see copyright law be aligned more with the interests of independent artists.
Where we probably would disagree is whether copyright terms should be guaranteed for the life of the creator + some number, or just some number. I’m not convinced that copyright must last the life of the creator, because I think it’s a reward that society gives artists in order to encourage art, rather than an inherent moral right (such as property rights, life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.)
You guys who are screaming about nothing being in the public domain are aware that often it is a simple matter of asking the copyright holder if you can use the work?
Publishers do it all the time.
And even sven – you’ve lost me totally. Are you really saying that there is a freeze on works moving into the public domain? While the length of time has extended, works still move into the public domain, it’s not going to be a 20 year freeze. Each year, new works will move out of the time frame.
And honestly, do you really believe that all artistic creative life will come to a standstill if you are not allowed to directly rip stuff from the copyright holder? There will be NO new creative work available for 20 years? Geez.
Actually, Primaflora, even sven is correct – one of the effects of the 1998 copyright term extension bill is that no works will enter the public domain until at least 2019. We’re at the beginning of a 20 year freeze. And that’s a best case scenario – it’s pretty much expected that terms will be extended again before 2019.
Artistic life won’t come to a standstill without new works coming into the public domain. But look what happened when “The Secret Garden” went into the public domain in 1987. A movie, a top-notch broadway musical, tv (us and bbc) and cabaret adaptions, cd-roms, searchable and annotated online versions, illustrated versions, a cookbook, audiobook, radio play, study guides, calendars.
There’s been a virtual secret-garden renaissance over the past fifteen years. In the worlds of performing arts and new, explorative fields of publishing like cd-roms and the internet, and in other loving tributes. In all of these fields, it’s the adaption, the performance, the augmentation of a well-loved work with new meanings – musical, culinary, scholarly, whatever – that give them value. Derivative art is legitimate art, and our society is better for it.
Would the Burnett estate, or whoever owned the copyrights, have had the foresight to license the rights to every one of these endeavors, at a reasonable rate and non-exclusively (so that multiple tv or play versions could co-exist)? Would they approve a free online version of the book with annotations? We can see for ourselves – they didn’t. The renaissance happened when the work entered the public domain.
Just think what’ll happen when “The Golden Bough” enters the public domain. Or Wodehouse’s “Jeeves”, or Twain’s autobiography, or “It Had To Be You” and “Rhapsody in Blue.” I can’t wait until my friends can read out-of-print books like “The Circus of Dr. Lao”.