Re: Constitutional Challenge to (C) Code

On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Amy Stoller <redherring[_at_]tuna.net> wrote:
>
> If you have produced any intellectual property, your heirs will have
> control over its disposition and will be able to benefit from it for
> seventy years after you die. Lifetime plus seventy years is by
> definition a limited time. The extension from fifty to seventy years
> brings the US in line with the rest of the signatories to Berne and
> gives artists a chance to leave something to their children with a
> reasonable hope that those children may benefit thereby. It is a
> sensible provision, given increased life expectancy. I hope it is not
> your position that creators and owners of intellectual property should
> be unable to leave anything of value to their spouses and children, or
> that their heirs should have to endure without remedy uses of their
> spouses or parents' life work which are repugnant to them.

It seems the increased life expectancy cuts both ways, does it not? The author, too, would enjoy increased life expectancy, and the longer the author lives the older get the heirs, who will have probably produced heirs of their own by the time of the author's passing, such that the seventy year post mortem will extend unto the fourth or fifth generation in many cases.

And, of course life plus seventy years is a limited term. So is life plus 100 years, or 1000 of them. Somewhere this slippery chronological slope must be bounded by "progress in science," etc, mustn't it?

However, I suppose that to the extent the 70 year figure is comparable to the prevailing European term, it has at least some objective reference point.

Mac Norton
mnorton[_at_]cavern.uark.edu Received on Wed Apr 01 1998 - 20:14:19 GMT