I've been asked to talk about copyrights and the balance between creator rights and public benefit. I read through some threads by Cory Doctorow on twitter and watched a talk he gave. In my view, he comes out fairly strong against rights holders. Since we're all writers here I'm curious if this is something you all think of as important or whether the 'public good' part of the policy behind copyright should be subservient to the creator's rights. One example I used on twitter--copyright term was initially 14 years, now it's life of the author plus 70 years (whereas patents have gone from 14 years to around 17 years). The current term is, in my view, beyond what can be said to promote the public good. It's a recognition of rights-holder interests (mostly corporate). Is it too long, or as writers do you feel it is best to keep those rights for yourself and your heirs as long as possible? I'd like to be able to present perspectives from both sides to the class I'm talking to. There is not a right or wrong answer--it's a policy discussion and we expect interests to differ depending on the stakes of the parties.
This is the fly in the ointment, to me. No corporation has ever created anything, and shouldn't be permitted to hold copyright. I've taken some grief here before for this, but I think copyright should be awarded only to the original creator(s), and only for their lifetimes, and not be salable or transferable. I don't see any reason that my heirs should profit from my work after my death, but if I want them to, I can save up the royalties and pass on the cash. Yes, I'm one of those 'information wants to be free' wonks, and while I don't begrudge anyone a reasonable reward for their efforts, I think a person's lifetime is a reasonable stretch, and would get literature into the public domain sooner than today's system, which I think is a good thing.
Thanks for the reply, @Earp. I'm at work, but will have more thoughts later. My initial thought on the non-transferability of copyright is that you'd lose all the liability protections an LLC or corporation has.
Since you mentioned life plus 70, I'm going to assume you're in the United States. The Constitution authorizes exclusive rights for a limited time. Once you're dead, you're dead. Ergo, they could not have meant to extend copyright beyond the life of the copyright holder.
Yes, people make that argument. The counter argument is that people eventually do die (so that's a limited time) and 70 years is clearly a limited time, so the life of an author plus 70 years is necessarily a limited time, except in the case of immortals.
When I'm a member of the public I vote public rights. When I'm part of a corporation I vote corporate. When I'm a property owner I vote property. When I'm a copyright holder I vote... You get the idea. I have less than absolute zero philosophy on this. All my beliefs go out the window when my business interests are at state. I've had very little success in life at keeping it real.
Yeah, well, the problem with that is that the author or inventor no longer exist after they die. The original 27 years seems like long enough to me.
The 70 years after death of the author isn't really giving the author much more than if the rights were merely death of the author + 20. Ok, so your distant relatives might get a small piece of the action up to 70 years after you're dead and gone, but they're not the ones getting the real commercial benefit. The large corporations (Amazon, publishing houses, etc.) are really the ones receiving this benefit and I see little evidence they provided something spectacular to the public good for the public to grant them that monopoly. Don't get me wrong, I've always held the view that the granting of time-limited monopolies is good, so we have 20 years for patents after the filing date. That's Fair enough (mostly). But even then, there are frequent calls for the abolition of the patent system because that monopoly is seen by many as being far too long. 70 years after the death of the author, though, is a ridiculously long time for a publicly granted monopoly. Say I come up with a brilliant piece of literature when I'm 30. Life expectancy is around 70-80 years, so let's take the lower end of that bracket -- I die when I'm 70. So, I've already had a copyright monopoly for 40 years when I become worm food and now we add 70 to that. This means that the public has granted me and my successors in title a 110 year monopoly over my work and any derivatives of it. Somewhere between 4-5 generations of people have come into being since I gained my copyright. To put that into perspective, 110 years ago from now takes us to 1910. That's the age of the silent black and white films. Hot off the press in the 1910s were: Tarzan of the Apes (the book by Edgar Rice Burroughs) and Sigmund Freud's English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. Tarzan has held up fairly well, especially in recent film adaptations, but Freud has been debunked so many times it's more a work of fantasy these days. Also bear in mind that when a film adaptation is made of a work, the clock starts running on an additional 70 year monopoly for the film adaptation itself. It's a never ending money printing machine for large corporates and we only have ourselves to blame for giving it to them on a silver platter.
