Yes, publishers are able to effectively monetize an author’s intellectual property, which is good for all parties - it gives good incentives to the IP creators to create, and it is a good method to broadcast the IP to the consuming public.
but what’s the deal with sustaining the copyright post death? the only thing I can see is that you need a greater-than-human-lifespan amount of time to recover rents on the IP that you, as a publisher, (over)paid for.
does anyone really think that the incentive to create artistic works would be impacted by the (slightly) reduced amount that a company would pay if they couldn’t keep copyright protection after the author’s death? if it’s an issue of unpredictability in human lifespans, then just re-write the rules to say you get a copyright for the author’s lifespan or 10 years, whichever is greater.
I can not see a justification for the current long posthumous copyright period, whereas I can see costs to society (in that they have to keep paying for it and that corporate media producers don’t have to create/purchase anything new if they can rest on their laurels of prior IP). can someone enlighten me?
(“well, see, it’s better for Disney to have a copyright on Mickey Mouse for 100 years, so that’s why they buy Congressional support to extend copyrights” aren’t very helpful. I’m more interested in how they justify this to the public or if there’s other considerations I haven’t realized)
The value to an individual of their IP rights (and thus their incentive to create that IP) is greater if they can leave it to their heirs. I’d elaborate, but really that’s all there is to it; there’s nothing magic about the lifespan of the author, one way or the other, as a measuring stick.
(Personally, I’m in favor of much shorter IP right durations, but it’s all a matter of proportion.)
It’s quite likely that there are people right on the margin, so that a reduction in their expected return pushes them over the line.
I can think of a couple other arguments for you (not that I necessarily agree with them myself). First is some kind of fairness or equity in the law, so that an artist or publisher receives the same benefit for the same work, regardless of when the artist might die after the work is completed.
The second idea depends a bit on how you view the “property” part of IP. I have had discussions with people who have advanced the idea that copyright should never expire; you should own it the same way you own physical property. From that perspective, the question is why copyright terms are so short, rather than so long.
It strikes me as being collossaly unfair that if I write a book that makes money and I die in a car accident the day it’s published, my child would be denied the benefits of the proceeds. I should be able to will that to her.
Exactly. The purpose is to allow the heirs to be able to benefit from the work. It’s hardly right for a publisher to be making a profit on a book while the author’s children don’t make a cent.
The same with people using derivative rights. If you have to pay an author on Monday for them, and he dies on Tuesday, then why is it right not to have you pay on Wednesday?
The length of 70 years is probably too long, but blame Adolph Hitler for that one. The extension was added in the US to have us with the same term required in the Berne Convention, which was increased from 50 to 70 years because the government of Bavaria wanted to keep Mein Kampf under copyright to control it.
If someone doesn’t like the length of the copyright term, nothing stops them from creating new works that aren’t under other people’s copyright.
The major major justification for copyright protection is to foster creativity by creating incentives to produce artistic works … do authors really contemplate their untimely demise when deciding to undertake a creative venture?
it may be unfair that you can’t transfer that property ownership, but is it doing anything to enhance the creative process? I don’t think so…
Does any speculator contemplate his demise when making an investment?
It’s a cost/benefit analysis. The time I’m willing to spend on a work is balanced against my expected return.
For example, over the last three years I’ve probably put about 2000 hours of labor into the book I’m working on now. I’m gambling that those hours will be worth it because afterward I’ll have ownership of an asset that will generate income to justify that investment of my time. But I don’t work to just support myself. I have a wife and kids. So an asset that would just evaporate upon my demise would be worth less to me than one with the potential to continue to generate revenue after my death.
Sure it does: it forces people to create on their own instead of making money from your work. If they want to make money, then they can go out and actually create something, instead of leeching on the talents of others.
Terry Pratchett is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and has announced that he plans to “take the disease with him” (translation: suicide, assisted suicide or euthanasia). His latest book was published this month. I strongly suspect that the question of whether his heirs will benefit from the book’s sales after his death, was an important consideration for him in deciding whether or not to write another book while he still can.
That said, I think the people who say “copyright should be eternal; if you don’t like it go write your own book, you leech” are being a bit too simplistic. It is not logical for intellectual “property” to follow the same rules as physical objects. The natural state of a piece of data (a story, a picture, a song) is to be easily and cheaply copied. Copyright is not the natural state of things; it is an artificial restriction which was instituted to stimulate a certain part of the economy. As an author, if you do not want people to read your stories without paying for them, you have the option to not publish the story at all; but once you do, it is no more natural to say that you should be able to control the further dissemination of that story for eternity, than for twenty years, or seventy, or two.
If the heirs of Henry Ford want to continue benefiting from his work, they can’t do that by selling the first T-Ford which Henry built, over and over again. If they want to keep making money, they will have to keep building new cars, and if they want to beat the competition they will have to keep making innovations to those cars. Likewise, I don’t begrudge the Pratchett heirs the ability to live well off their father’s work for the next decade or two, but if his grandchildren want to still benefit from selling stories a hundred years from now, then I think it’s fair to say that they should have to roll up their sleeves and write some new stories, instead of leeching off the work of a distant ancestor.
A 150 year old story isn’t a piece of property; it’s a piece of history. I am fine with making copyrights transferable to the author’s heirs, but I don’t see the point in making copyright terms last so long that they are likely to survive the author’s children, and quite possibly his grandchildren, as well.
Not really. If I have an item, you cannot simultaneously have the same item. That’s a physical fact. In the absence of a legal system, the item’s ownership may be determined in a different way (typically “might makes right”) but it would still end up with someone being the owner. Data does not naturally behave like that, and it takes a rather complex and heavy-handed system of enforcement to uphold the illusion that it does.
Me too, but her daddy made that money fair and square; I wouldn’t want to prevent him from giving it to her, even if I could. On the other hand, I see no value in having my government spend effort and money on maintaining a piece of artificial property created by someone’s great-grandparent.
Paris Hilton, by the way, has accumulated a seven-figure net worth of her own, through her movie and TV roles, product endorsements, and other income which she derives from being a professional celebrity. Of course she would not have achieved those things without having a rich and famous daddy, but she took that ball and ran with it. You can argue about the social value of her “job”, but it is not the case that she is simply spending the contents of the family treasure chest.
Or not. The idea that everything must be owned by an individual is a product of our particular society. Other cultures define things differently as suits their needs. If there’s a single well that serves an entire village, or a single field where everyone grazes their goats, it’s likely that who owns it is “no one” or “everyone”.
Terry Pratchet wrote his books fair and square.
ALL property is “artificial”. The concept of ownership is created through law and social consensus. Which means that we can draw the lines wherever we want, depending on what sort of outcome we’re looking for. Arguing that ownership of a piece of land is somehow less “real” than ownership of the distribution rights to a work of art is silly.
Look, if you want to argue that there are practical reasons for not extending copyright indefinitely … I agree with you. I also agree that there are practical reasons for not allowing large fortunes to be passed down from generation to generation. If the kids of multi-millionaires have a knack for making money, I’m sure they’ll do so on their own. And not having access to buckets of easy money from their grand-daddy would provide them with a strong incentive to work hard and make something of themselves.
I think we’re pretty much on the same line here, Hamster King. There is nothing magic or inevitable about the idea of copyright lasting a certain period of time – or even about having copyright in the first place. It’s something which our society decided to institute because it produces value, but there is nothing inherent in the structure of the universe which says that ideas or stories or songs must be owned forever by the person who first came up with them.
I feel confident in saying that, in general, the allocation of sparse goods is best handled through property rights. And that those ownership rights should be freely transferable and that government shouldn’t go mucking around with them too much, by e.g. preventing people from giving money to their kids or grandkids. I agree that a different society may decide to arrange things differently, but looking at history I prefer to live in this one. However, data is not a sparse good, and pretending that it behaves as one is not obviously the right thing to do.
A.A. Milne had been dead for many years when Congress voted to extend the copyright on Winnie the Pooh, et al. The copyright extension had no effect on Milne’s heirs anyway: they’d long since sold their rights. DIS is one of the DJIA-30, but I won’t be quite cynical enough to say the copyright purpose was to prop up the stock market. Claiming that its purpose was to (teleologically?) encourage the creativity of the long-dead Milne, however, does strike me as an odd claim.
A.A. Milne had been dead for many years when Congress voted to extend the copyright on Winnie the Pooh, et al. The copyright extension had no effect on Milne’s heirs anyway: they’d long since sold their rights. DIS is one of the DJIA-30, but I won’t be quite cynical enough to say the copyright purpose was to prop up the stock market. Claiming that its purpose was to teleologically encourage the creativity of the long-dead Milne, however, does strike me as an odd claim.
(Just in case the obvious isn’t … er … obvious, the law could have been phrased so as not to grandfather in long-dead creators.)
I said I wouldn’t make the cynical claim, but let’s do connect some dots. If Eeyore and Piglet became public domain then GNP might indeed suffer! (Toys would cost less.) Yet human contentness, measured in other than dollars, might increase!
I don’t want to come down on the side of criminal plagiarists, but much of the argumentation in favor of “IP” rights is bullshit. Drug profits, for example, are used more to bribe doctors and legislators than to pay for scientists.
My background is in computers and I know of at least two anti-copying mechanisms in which the mechanisms, allegedly to prevent copyright abuse, themselves abused copyrights illegally!
Yeah, IP doesn’t apply only to the publishers, but anyway anybody who’s got those particular rights shouldn’t just lose them because one of the parties happened to die. If an author gets run over by a car on the same day his novel hits the shelves, the publisher should lose their copyrights… seriously? I don’t agree with a lot of details about IP, but this particular one doesn’t bother me at all. septimus confusidus, copy rights are NOT automatically and exclusively the property of the publisher. Does that help clear your enormous levels of confusion?
Hell, it’s not necessary to buy Eeyore or Piglet toys. It’s perfectly possible to buy a toy that’s not connected with a book or movie, or even (gasp!) make one! One of my favorite toys as a child was a stuffed cat that my father had made while he was laid up with a busted leg. I would even argue that having a toy that’s NOT based off a movie or book is a better toy, and refusing to buy something just because it’s heavily marketed is a good lesson. Now, I did give my own daughter SOME of the heavily marketed toys (Rainbow Brite and Barbie in particular), but she also got quite a few generic toys, as well as a lot of large cardboard boxes, which I regard as one of the best toys ever.
I thought my message was clear but evidently it wasn’t.
The extension of copyright, justified upthread as incentive or reward to a creator, was applied to A.A. Milne after he was already dead. How does one incentivize or reward a dead person? What do publishers have to do with it?
I’m not sure which side you’re arguing on, if any. The fact is, that Disney’s Milne-themed toys do sell at a premium. The justification that such a premium rewards creative genius is nonsensical, when the Copyright period was changed (lengthened) by Congress long after the creator was dead (and his heirs had sold their rights).
