Re: thought for the week

From: Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 09:38:19 -0700 (PDT)

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Colin Seeger <seeger[_at_]ozemail.com.au> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Jeroen Hellingman <jehe[_at_]kabelfoon.nl> wrote:
> >
> > Considering that the average economical life span of a copyrighted work
> > is about 5 years, a life+70 years copyright term is ridiculously long.
>
> Please cite source for estimated commercial life of 5 years. Warner
> Chappell, as owners of the copyrights generated by Irving Berlin,
> amongst others, will be amazed to hear how precarious their business
> really is...

See: "Copyright Term Extension: Estimating the Economic Values"

      URL: http://www.senate.gov/~dpc/crs/reports/pdf/98-144.pdf

They find for books, nonclassical music, and motion pictures, about 4% of the surviving titles from an initial year will "die" each following year. After 17 years, half the works will be out-of-print; by 70 years, over ninety percent (!) will be out-of-print, with several more decades of copyright still remaining.

It's very nice for Irving Berlin's grandkids to get money without having to work for it; but do we -really- need to keep the other 90% of works from those years copyrighted, when there is no economic benefit to the author, the publisher, -or- the public? Either put these "dead" works into the public domain where they belong, or at least declare it fair use to copy them, until such time as the publisher sees fit to fulfil their end of the copyright bargain.

Lance Purple

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| lpurple at netcom dot com |

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Received on Thu Jul 29 1999 - 16:39:31 GMT