Well, Primaflora might have departed, but I feel obligated to respond to the last post out of principle.
I can understand that it’s not an issue for the kind of writing you do, but I hope you see why it is very much an issue for some others and not some romantic ideal. If you haven’t read Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, I suggest you do so.
Yes, but as someone else mentioned, practically no one here is arguing that copyrights should disappear, just that they last too damn long. Come on, what’s wrong with a flat 75 years, the average human lifetime?
I agree with Stricker on this one, that 75 years (or even life plus 50) sound good to me.
If you paint over a print by EnderW and call it a variation, if it can still be recognizable (up to a certain percent, I don’t remember the amount) as his work, you should pay him a percentage. I don’t see any problem using other people’s work for inspiration, as long as you yourself aren’t trying to cash in on someone else’s work.
And here’s how it affects me as a little guy:
Generally, when going on job interviews, you’d either bring your portfolio with you or drop the book off for people to see and then pick it up later. Increasingly though, people are asking to see your website or a cd of your work. I have worries with this because I will be handing my work over in digital form to people I don’t know who could copy it over and rip not only me off, but the multiple employers and photographers I have collaborated with over the years.
Now in my IRL portfolio I have a watercolor rendering of a child reading in bed and the foreground has characters of the book he’s reading dancing around. The characters are from “Where The Wild Things Are”. I am not going to sit around bitching that ‘Oh, woe is me, it’s hampering my creativity because I may not be able to put this ONE piece of work in my new digital portfolio’. I’ll put one of the other works that are completely mine in instead. If I do decide that I want to try to get work in children’s books, I could write and tell them that it was a school project done XX years ago, would you mind if I put it in my portfolio just to show that I could render in that particular style. If they say ‘no’ then tough breaks for me, I could create my own children’s book to promote.
Sorry I hit reply too soon, I meant to add that while creating art for art’s sake might be a noble thought indeed, we all have to feed the kids and pay rent, (or I suppose I should ask the landlord to waive the rent because it would further the ‘progress of the arts’ if I could live for free, that would be noble too huh? It sure would protect the purity of my art too because then I wouldn’t have to sell rights to it so I could live.)
Stricker van Gogh, I think we’re just on opposite (but not extreme) sides of the copyright spectrum. You say you can live with 75 years and I probably could too. I’d much prefer Life + 20 though for the reason someone brought up earlier in this thread: it provides security during the lifetime plus compensation to any minor children afterwards.
If the person dies right after creation, you still have protection and you get to shave 55 years off that flat 75. At the same time, during the life, the artist is always protected.
If you want to be Gene Roddenberry or Chris Carter or George Lucas and lease out your creation on a novel by novel basis, you have every right to do so. If you want to keep it yours yours yours and you’re 120 having written it as a child prodigy, then that too should be your right.
Enough artists still have minor children 75 years after creating a piece of art that longer copyrights are required? That sounds like a pretty contrived argument to me. Playing off of emotions (“oh, but the children!”) instead of facts.
In my example, I already paid him for it. I purchased a print. As far as I’m concerned, once I purchase something, whether it’s a piece of art, a chair, or a baseball bat, it is mine to do with as I please, provided I don’t try to pass it off as my own. If I purchase a car and incorporate it into a piece of art, then that is my business. Same with the bat, and same with Ender’s painting.
Isn’t that a bit hypocritical? You’re willing to profit from Maurice Sendak’s hard work designing his characters as long as it’s in person? The way I see it, if you are sincere about the arguments you’re making here, you owe him royalties for every time you’ve displayed your work incorporating his characters, unless you have explicit permission to use them in that way.
Explain to me how I’ve profited from his work. It was a art school project shown to maybe two people in an interview enviroment. I have not tried to scan it, print it out and then sell it on ebay or a street corner or even sell it to my Mom.
I thought I made my argument fairly clear, but I’ll go through it one more time. Life + 20 isn’t for the children. It might help the children or whomever gets the copyright, but it’s not for the children. It’s for the creator. It’s for the life of that creator. If I make something at 15 years of age it should be mine for my lifetime. If I choose to get loan it out to a few people that’s my choice but I don’t agree that it should be wrestled away from me at age 90. It’s mine for life.
Also something else should be made clear about “my” painting. If someone buys my painting and paints over it, they have the right to sell it again. They have that right just as they have the right to sell it in its original form and make a profit. I’ve relinquished control over that particular piece.
What you don’t have the right to do is make 1,000 copies of that piece and try to sell those. It’s why Used CD shops are legal, but they can’t burn (in the copying sense) their inventory and keep a neverending supply available.
You didn’t intend to gain employment though the use of your interpretation of his copyrighted and probably trademarked characters? I guess you were only showing them in conversation, not hopding for anything to come of it, right?
But such is the nature of making a contribution to the collective consciousness by producing a piece of art. It’s not something you have an exclusive right to, aside from what the government sees fit to grant you. If you want to keep it to yourself and have total control over who sees it, who copies it, and who benefits from it, then don’t make it public. If you want to reap the benefits of making your art public, such as income, notoriety, fame, etc, then you necessarily accept the terms of that action. One of which is that people will copy it. You will lose total control over it. Your copyright will last only a limited period of time, which can change any time congress votes to make that change. And hopefully, one of those times will be soon. Periodic extensions whenever something is about to enter the public domain are effectively perpetual copyrights, which are expressly unconstitutional.
I agree with this. Since we agree on the absolutes, then we’re back to bickering over the middleground. When I paint over your art, it becomes my art, and I should be able to sell it as my own “variation” on your theme.
Make that “I should be able to reproduce and sell it as my own variation on your theme,” in the same way that Andy Warhol made a stack of Campbell’s soup cans his own. For the purpose of my point, whether he actually paid royalties to Campbell’s is irrelevant. I’m saying that it shouldn’t be required.
Good grief. Was there this much misinformation about copyrights on the other threads?
First: for the OP question. Would you feel the same way about someone using the Frost poem in a porn movie? Strip show? Church service? I’d guess that your friend’s application sounded reasonable, and we could disagree with the heirs’ decision, but for some time after an author’s death there should be some control.
I’m with the life + 20 (or even +10) camp. The extensions recently have little to do with authors’ rights, but more with Disney’s greed, as they are petrified that the early Mickey Mouse cartoons might get into the public domain, where they should be.
As for Romeo and Juliet - you cannot copyright an idea (patents are for that, to a certain extent) only an expression. The copyright on the Romeo and Juliet movies is on the images not the underlying words. You could take the DVD, copy down all the words, and sell it without violating any copyright.
R&G would violate Shakespeare’s “copyright” because it uses dialog directly from Hamlet. (Probably too much to fall under fair use.) If he had just used the characters, in a different place, he might be okay. That is why the characters in StarTrek and Star Wars are trademarked.
Copyright should be a tradeoff between the rights of the creator and the rights of society to use the works after a certain period. These days society is losing big - and Frosts’ heirs are not the problem. Disney, Jack Valenti, and the DMCA are the problem.
PS - music from 50 years ago is falling out of copyright in music, and much that was never released is now being published. (Famous Callas performances, for one.) There was an article in the NY Times about this the other day. Strictly speaking, it is illegal to import these CDs into the US, but it is legal to publish them in Europe. I for one can’t see the problem with releasing these now, except that the record companies with sole rights want to keep on making money.
Or more importantly. that permission should not be required. A lot of the problems with the current system of effectively permanent copyrights would be solved by compulsory licensing at guranteed reasonable rates.
But since we don’t have that, (and it would be ugly to administer) at much better solution is to simply reduce the duration of copyright to something substantially less than an average lifetime.
There’s no rational justification for tying the term of a copyright to the lifetime of the creator (though there is certainly an emotional one).
This is absurd. No author deserves to control everyone else’s creativity throught his/her lifetime. Anyone who so self absorbed that he can’t tolerate seeing someone else build on his/her work should just not publish in the first place.
The purpose of copyright law is to “Insure progress”, not to gurantee authors control of their works. The way they insure progress is to grant an monopoly on use-for-profit of a work for a limited time. But this control is at the expense of everyone else’s freedom of speach.. Which is a damned important freedom, and not to be lightly taken away.
So the only proper term for a copyright is the minimum term that is sufficient to provide incentive for creativity. 14 years is plenty of time in todays world, even more so than when 14 year term was originally passed.
Just imagine if you tried to pitch an idea for a movie on those terms:
“I have this great idea for a movie, but it’ll take an entire lifetime to make enough money for you to turn a profit!”.
How long would it take them to throw you out on your ear? Hell, in the corporate world, if it took more than a year or two to pay for itself, it probably can’t get made. In terms of providing incentive to create, 14 years is more than plenty.
Hell, I dare you to find an example of someone who would create if there was a lifetime-term copyright, but would refuse to create if the term were only 14 years.
Sounds good to me. Much as I might like to control how people use my software after it falls into their hands, I realize it’s impossible, and furthermore I don’t think I deserve that level of control over it as an author.
Why the objection? Why should Frost have control over every possible use of his poem, just because he was the first to write it down?
Are you saying the dialogue of a movie is uncopyrightable? Common sense dictates that the dialogue is covered by copyright just like the musical score or the still pictures.
The dialogue of Romeo & Juliet is no longer copyrighted, of course, because it was written centuries ago. But I believe the point is that it’s impossible to do the same thing with “modern classics”, even though many of those classics borrowed heavily from earlier productions (at least conceptually, if not directly).
In fact, the modern interpretation of copyright law grants the author exclusive rights to characters and situations and not just arrangements of words.
I wanted to highlight this part of Tejota’s post, because I think it goes to an important dichotomy between two sides in this argument. One side believes that author has an inherent moral right to exert control over the use of their creative works, and believes that this right should be protected by copyright law. Most of the posters proposing copyright terms of the life of the author or longer fall in this camp.
The other side believes that either (a) authors have no inherent moral right to control the use of their creative works, or (b) any inherent moral right is not relevant to copyright. In general, the posters advocating that the term of copyright should balance the benefits to authors with the costs to society fall within this camp.
To help resolve this argument, let’s look yet again at the basis for copyright, Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution:
As is plainly stated, this clause grants the government the ability to give limited rights to authors for the sole purpose of promoting the progress of science and the arts. It most certainly does not recognize any inherent right of authors to control the use of their works, nor does it even permit the government to give rights to authors in recognition of an inherent right to control the use of their works.
In short, the first camp has no constitutional justification for using copyright to protect a perceived right of authors to control their works. If you believe such a right exists and should be endorsed by the government, you should be advocating for a constitutional amendment to recognize that right, not trying to shoehorn it into copyright.
Instead, as the clause states, copyright should solely be used as a means to the end of promoting science and the arts. The yardstick against which the success of copyright should be measured is extent to which it promotes this end. At some point (or points) along this yardstick, the promotion of science and the arts is maximized, and it is at these points where copyright law should be. At these points (as at any point on the yardstick) there will always be authors for whom compensation due to copyright is insufficient. Thus, a lack of compensation for particular authors is not a sufficient condition to declare that a particular set of copyright laws is good or bad.
I cannot give you an example specifically because authors and artists create their works in a country with a “lifetime guarantee.” They aren’t constrained to 14 years and so there’s no possible way to tell what wouldn’t have been created and how the world would have changed with a 14 year period kept as the length of the copyright.
I can tell you this, though. If we had a 14 year period, the movie studios would have an absolute field day. Any book published before January 10, 1989 is fair game. It’s in the public domain now and anyone can do anything with it. You can make a movie based on the book without seeking the author’s permission and without paying him one red cent. 1989. That’s practically yesterday as far as I’m concerned.
That Back to the Future trilogy they just released? Part one would be public domain but parts two and three would still be protected, even though they’re all sold as a box set and were made just 5 years apart by the same company.
14 years is too short a time period. Would some people stop creating work because of it? Maybe. Would they be upset that work from a decade and a half ago no longer earns them anything? Hell yes.
