>There is no empirical evidence that any term of copyright has value to
>the community, but there has been a well settled belief for hundreds, if
>not thousands, of years that it does. For most educational material,
>anything over 20 years old is pretty much obsolete.
Yet anyone who wants to do something new with that obsolete material cannot do so for another 50 years in the US, even if the original owner of that material is nowhere to be found.
>75 years or 100 years is not going to make much difference.
You're absolutely right. It is not going to help the creator one little bit! It will however hurt the users of works, who are estopped from their unfettered use 50, 70, or godness knows how long after the death of the creator, if the term-extension madness isn't stopped.
> An argument that the term
>of copyright should be limited to assist developing countries is
>specious.
I've heard about limiting certain patent medicine rights in this way, for htis purpose, but not copyright.
>Copyright is the only form of property that I can think of that is taken
>away from its creator after a certain period of time.
Patents? Patent medicine? Industrial design? Abandoned bank accounts? Escheated corporations? Adversely possessed land?
The law doesn't like perpetuities in any type of property; with the exception of properly maintained trademarks, there is no property right tha lasts LONGER than copyright in the 70-year countries.
>do that with copyright. Why should there be any limit to the length of
>the term of copyright?
Or to turn it around, how do you figure out who, of your 20,000 cousins, would own copyright in a letter your great-great-great-great.... great-grandfather wrote in 2003?
>If I create a work of art in the form of a
>sculpture or a painting, it has the potential of being mine and my
>families forever. If I create a work of art in the form of a poem or a
>song, I only own it for a little while. Where is the logic in that?
It creates certainty in the law, and allows our culture to continually reinvent itself. Received on Tue Nov 18 2003 - 02:25:59 GMT
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