Re: thought for the week

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Thanks for quoting this, it was exactly my source... and yes, just like you can abandon real estate, and may loose title to it if you do nothing with it for 30 years in some countries, I am very much in favour of an abandonment clause in copyright law, that works something like this:

If a work is unavailable (because it is out-of-print, or out-of-stock, an old publishers trick to avoid having to say out-of-print) for 5 years, the rights should revert to the original owner, and, after another 5 years, irrevertably to the public. The initial period may be longer, say 25 years, but after that, not keeping works available is the same as abandoning it. If this is difficult to achieve by changing current laws and international treaties, I would go for fair use for single copies, and compulsory licensing for multiple copies.

Note that in the digital age, works may never go out-of-print anymore, simply because copies can be created on demand at a fairly low cost, and thus, this such a clause would loose some of its value...

Jeroen Hellingman
<jehe[_at_]kabelfoon.nl> Received on Fri Jul 30 1999 - 15:43:30 GMT