Well, if the editor of the magazine wants to include an entire unpublished novel in its review, she can go ahead and offer the author $5 million for it and hope the author agrees with that price(*) If, however the book is formally published (even if currently out-of-print) then the reviewer would be damaging the commercial value of the authors/publishers’ investment.
(*) Surely you won’t say that if the author feels that’s too low then the reviewer becomes entitled to go ahead and publish it anyway? What right do you think a creator has to choose where, when, how and to whom the creation will be published/ disseminated? It sure sounds like your answer is “none” – you seem to have a serious bone to pick with the whole issue of what is called “moral rights” in Intellectual Property Law
In the interests of clarifying copyright terms in the U.S., since there seem to be a lot of contradictory posts in this thread on that subject, note the following from the US Copyright Office:
The real problem with US copyright law isn’t the notion of copyright itself, but the absurdly long durations afforded under current law. I’ve argued in other threads that the durations should be reduced to something more in line with the durations for US patents (20 years for utility patents, 14 years for design patents), and individual copyrights should not be tied to the life of the author. I would propose something like 15 years from first publication or 25 years from the date of first creation, whichever expires first.
Thanks DCU. I’ll check it out. I appreciate your taking the time to pinpoint the information that I have been looking for and posting where to find it.
And thanks again to **Mighty Maximino ** for your advice as well. Sorry if I seemed to be putting too much weight to your opinion. As I said before, after my initial foray into this thread, there was much I didn’t read (due to time constraints). I guess your informative posts led me to believe you were an expert in the field. This is why I appeared to be looking for advice from “some guy on a message board.”
I am a law student with vast interest in copyright, but my studies are almost entirely of software and media copyrights in the post-1978 framework (especially with the DMCA and various proposed copy-prevention technologies). I’m really not all that familiar with things that happened before that. I didn’t mean to be rude and I’m sorry if it came across that way; I just meant to say that I couldn’t tell you for sure if anything in particular was in the public domain or not, and I don’t want to give you a false sense of security.
I think that’s actually the point of the thread; you ought to be able to tell if something is copyrighted or not. I also agree with DCU that copyright terms are too long. It’s also intruiging that copyright originally only covered the right to publish the particular material copyrighted. Considering there are substantial industry forces arrayed against both fair use and the public domain ever extending again, this is something that people really ought to care about.
Thank you, but no, I didn’t feel you were rude at all (that was the reason for the smilie). I just wanted to explain why it was that I was looking to you for factual information on this subject, whereas to you, you’re just a guy on a message board.
I agree…very much so. I just regret that there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it. The political and legislative tide seems be expanding things in the other direction and I don’t know what could be done to reverse it.
Actually I saw ads for Amos and Andy tapes as recently as the mid nineties. IIRC They were in Parade (A tiny magazine included in the sunday edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I assume other newspapers).
Yes, my answer is “none”, and I don’t agree with those “moral rights” at all. IMO the only legitimate goal of intellectual property law is to compensate artists and inventors when their creations are used.
So what if the author doesn’t think that’s a fair price? What then? Can the newspaper then say “Well, we tried,” and release the book without compensation?
They can either negotiate a price with the author and include it in their newspaper, or they can tell their readers where to buy the book themselves. (If the book isn’t for sale, and there are no plans to release it for sale, then it’s abandoned.)
But, luckily, your opinion has nothing to do with how laws are written, because your opinions on how things should work would royally screw anyone who makes anything creative. I certainly have the write to decide that something I made isn’t good enough to release, and you as some nobody with no connection to me or my concerns shouldn’t be able to come in out of nowhere and distribute it over my objections. You don’t make sense, and, worse than that, you don’t seem to want to try to make sense in any way other than to feebly justify your desire to get things for free. Your idea of “ethical” is rampant thievery.
No one with “no connection” to you would be distributing your work, because if you didn’t want it released, you wouldn’t be giving it to people who have no connection to you.
Gee, you saw right through me. My views on intellectual property are just feeble justifications for getting stuff for free. I also hate freedom and eat babies. :rolleyes:
: popping out of “low profile” mode for a second . . . :
Wait a minute, wait a minute . . . so the people who “give” the photo lab their photos to be developed are somehow “connected” to the customer, therefore they’ve got a right to distribute those photos if the customer (the owner of the photographs) doesn’t intend to have them published? (i.e. “abandons” them)?
And the visitor to someone’s house who sees a painting on the wall should be able to publish a copy of the painting, since they are obviously deeply “connected” to the owner of the house (even though they could just be a maid or an electrician) and therefore they should be able to publish the painting against the owner’s will, since the owner hadn’t intended to have the painting published?
And if the maid or the photo lab doesn’t intend to make money off of the pulication of the painting or photo that they had “access” to, do they have to pay the owner of these things, or not?
Or can the owner of the photos or the painting just claim that each picture is for sale for a million dollars (like Garfield226 suggests) and then be off the hook with this whole “abandoned” scheme?
Something that isn’t for sale at a reasonable price may as well not be for sale at all. I suppose I’ll amend my comment to “if it’s not for sale for less than the per capita GNP, and there are no plans to release it for sale at such a price, then it’s abandoned.”
We could debate the precise dividing line, of course. $35,000 (last year’s per capita GNP) for a single copy of a copyrighted work is still laughably high, but at least it’s within the bounds of reason - if enough people were really interested in the work, it wouldn’t be too hard to buy one for them to pass around.
Of course, that figure is arbitrary, and not based on any ethical principle. Ethically speaking, I’d say the work only has to be priced so that members of its target audience can realistically afford it; if everyone who cares about your work is a multi-trillionaire, $800 billion might even be reasonable.
And, you say “target audience.” Who decides who my “target” audience is, if not me, and what if I decide my “target” audience is no one, because I don’t want it released in the first place?
Ah yes, how could I forget about your favorite examples? In those scenarios, I suppose you could say that the people distributing the photos have no connection to you - no personal connection, at least.
Paying the creator is only an ethical obligation if the creator is selling the work. If you choose to sit on your creation instead of selling it, you cut yourself out of the loop.
On second reading, Dan Norder makes even less sense than I thought he did:
The only people who would be “screwed” are the ones who abuse copyright by sitting on works instead of distributing them, who stifle progress instead of contributing to it.
What you certainly have is a bald assertion. You say you have that right, I say you don’t. Looks like we’re at an impasse.
Speaking of not making sense… how is compensating the creator when you copy his works “[getting] things for free”? How is distributing an abandoned work “rampant thievery” when nobody is being deprived of any property or compensation?
Perhaps “target audience” was the wrong phrase - I mean the people who would enjoy it, benefit from it, or build on it. Obviously some of them won’t be able to afford it individually, but a reasonable price is one that would be within the grasp of the community as a whole, so that the work could contribute to society’s benefit and could be built upon to create innovative new works.
Examples I use, because in the thread I linked to on page one, you specifically agreed that (unless there was a contract signed promising otherwise) individuals such as photo lab employees and visitors to a person’s house could distribute the creative works they had “access” to. I bring this up because it paints a completely different picture than publishing a work or putting it on public display, selling a thousand copies (or having the public at large see it), and then deciding that you want to take it out of circulation. The former shows an intent to distribute the work; that the work is meant for public consumption (at least for a while), while the latter—taking photos to a photo lab, or simply having something on display on your wall at home do not show an intent (at least not in most peoples’ minds) to publicly display or publish the work. But in our previous discussions, you seemed to not recognize that distinction. Seemed quite adamant about it, as a matter of fact.
And so could they “distribute” the work or not? You clearly thought they could and should previously, since the owner of the work allowed them “access.” (In other words, let them into the house to repair something, or took the negatives for them to develop.)
So, in other words, by hook or by crook, once someone makes something and anyone else has “access” to it, either the creator has to put it up for sale or risk someone publishing it against their will anyway. So there is no “opt out” clause when something does something creative. Once anyone else sees it, they run the risk of the work being published, no matter how vehemently they do not want it to be published. That’s certainly a unique perspective.
I’ll go back to low profile mode; it looks like Garfield and the others here are much smarter than me and are putting a new perspective on this debate.
Regarding Mr2001, I’m at a loss to understand why so many people are continuing to argue with this guy. He clearly has no idea of the concept that people are entitled to own their own creations, to sell, give away, withhold, distribute, donate…whatever…as they see fit. He only grudgingly accepts the idea they should be paid at all…as though once somethings created, it’s part of the world and everybody is entitled to it.
I think copyright protections are allowed for an absurdly long time, and I’d love to see something done to make them more reasonable. In my mind, ten or fifteen years should be sufficient for the artist to reap most of the monetary rewards he/she is going to recieve as a result of having created a specific work. But arguing with this guy (and I really don’t mean this disrespectfully, Mr2001, I just don’t think you get the concept of artist ownership) seems to me to be a totally futile waste of time. You might as well be trying to convince someone who refuses to accept it that two plus two equals four. If they just keep playing games and aren’t interested in learning or accepting the math, you just shrug and let it go, leaving whatever is to become of him to fate.
Just popping back for a second. (Won’t she ever go away?)
Some will agree with you, but my hunch is that few artists will. You mentioined eariler that you are copying other artists’ works (which is not explicitly a criticism, don’t get me wrong) which might be interpreted as a motivation for you to want to want copyright shortened—because you would like to copy and sell these works legally. But on the flipside, you’ve got a lot of us who do unique works (from our own heads or using our own photos as reference) and we aren’t really keen on seeing something we did a scant 10 years ago, (perhaps before it was in “fashion” and therefore didn’t make us any money) become open season for everyone else. Sometimes it takes a long time for someone’s work to pick up momentum and earn enough to compensate the artist for all that they put into it. But alas, I realize that many (often non-artist or non-creative types) never really grasp this.
There’s more to the issue than that, and it’s been done to death on previous threads and I’ve not got the energy to rehash it all over again here. But getting back to the original issue of the OP, that I do agree that if something is truly, 100% abandoned (meaning, no one cares about it, no legal copyright holders have any interest in it, nobody), then by all means, let someone else have a crack at it. But if someone who has a legal right to it and they have an active interest in it, then it’s not abandoned.
Like I said before, some of the rest of you are much smarter than me. Excellent point.
