Maybe it would have encouraged him to write the last books and thus have an ending

First of all, your timeline is off: A Game of Thrones was published in 1996, and the Game of Thrones series premiered in 2011.

Second of all, even if you were correct, that would only apply to the first book, not the subsequent ones, which were spread out across 1999-2011 (indeed, A Dance with Dragons came out the same year as the TV series premiered).

So perhaps you'd like to pick a different copyright maximalist strawman?

Even if the timeline in the question is off, do you agree with the premise? If Stephen King puts out a novel in 2026, when should I be able to sell photocopies of the novel without paying royalties. 2027?

According to the regime this thread is discussing (in observationist's post upthread), 2037. This seems more than fair to me.

Of course it seems fair to you, it's not your IP that's being stolen before you were able to extract all it's worth from.

You've completely misunderstood the social contract inherent in copyright. There's no theft in adaptation. Copyright is an intentional trade-off by society to incentivise the creation of new works for society's benefit by giving authors a temporary monopoly. Perpetual copyright would obviously maximize the incentives for authors, but harm society by precluding the creation of new works based on the original. Instead, society chooses a limited period where authors can get most of the benefit while trying to keep the period short enough that works remain relevant.

Saying it's all theft entirely misses the point.

> There's no theft in adaptation

There is if it's taken without license when it would otherwise be restricted...

It’s not being stolen because he would have published it knowing the copyright laws. Also even with copyright laws as they are, selling unlicensed copies isn’t theft. It’s illegal but no stealing is involved.

I'd argue that the question is pretty much what should constitute "stealing" and what doesn't. You're certainly entitled to the opinion that it is, but that's a bit circular in terms of justifying a length of copyright. Not everyone will agree with you on whether it would make sense to consider it "stealing" after a certain length of time.

Looking past that specific word choice, there's an implication here that only the author would have an unbiased opinion on it. I'd argue that they're just as likely to have a bias that would cause them to argue for a policy that is unnecessarily onerous because by the same logic, they're not the ones who would be missing or on anything from it.

I think it would be very reasonable for copyright to return to its original terms: 14 years, with an optional renewal for another 14.

The vast majority of works make the vast majority of their money during that time frame. Indeed, for some works (like software), it's still probably much too long!

Citing a few wildly extreme outliers as evidence that we should stick with anything remotely resembling the current scheme a) is either disingenuous or betrays a deep misunderstanding of statistics, and b) can only work based on an appeal to emotion derived from growing up under the current scheme and seeing a creator's work as indelibly theirs forever, rather than something that should, once they have been allowed to make a living from it for a reasonable time, become the collective property of all humanity.

This is a pretty braindead take by an American who is fundamentally incapable of imagining any value system that does not include a price tag.

Believe it or not, many things in life have great value for everyone else without involving money. Money is not the one and only thing you should concern yourself with.

To answer your question: yes, everyone plays by the same rules. If you don't finish your book series before copyright expires and someone makes a show out of it, you've missed your chance. That's capitalism for you.

What's more logical here? Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity or is it perhaps a better business bet to allow short copyright to protect the immediate rights of the creator and then allow more businesses to make more products based on the work? Do you want more capitalism or none? You can't have it both ways.

In a world of print media and books, 20 year copyright makes sense; it gives the media time to disperse through the population, saturate, have whatever impact it will on the culture, and throughout that time, the originator can profit.

In a world where distribution of a novel the size of War and Peace takes less than a one second download, there's no value beyond gatekeeping and exclusivity that publishers and platforms can provide, and those are arbitrary and artificially imposed, and entirely unnecessary.

Copyright is fundamentally a ceding of power by a society to individuals, granting them permission to claim sole ownership of their writings for a period of time, preventing other people and institutions from plagiarizing the work. We, society, cede the right to freely exchange information in deference to the creators of different media so they have the opportunity to profit from it.

The value of media is independent from the commercial activity which copyright protects. Someone attempting to claim authorship of public domain works might do it better, or maybe they make it worse.

There's no other purpose to copyright when the internet exists. We've seen nearly 4 decades of what this sort of system does; it allows those with lots of resources and lawyers to extort and exploit those without on technicalities and gotchas. It enriches and rewards middlemen assholes without concurrent return of value to society. It results in brainless reshashes and remakes and protected IP franchises into milquetoast formulaic omnislop. Any sort of actual creativity and variety gets suppressed or outcompeted or even legally squashed, even on the off chance that it might negatively impact sales. Books and films get destroyed as tax writeoffs. Artists get their music and writing and entire life work hoarded away by some massive multibillion dollar corporation, and sometimes even left to rot and fade away to dust, never to appear again.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Your idea of a copyright system has been tried, and it has failed. It's time to update to a system which works in the world which is.

The ultimate purpose of copyright is to protect creators from the rapacious publishing industry. Now, it doesn't do a good job of it, in large part because the publishers have twisted it to mostly be a tool for publishers attacking publishers rather than creators to retain their rights.

But how much better would it be for creators if you gave those rapacious publishers the unconditional right to screw them over if they just wait 5 years (given production lead times)? You're taking away essentially the only lever creators have over some of the greediest capitalists imaginable, and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that's going to improve the lives of creators.

> Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity

Funny that you think I think this. No, I think the ideal copyright term is somewhere around 50 years. When you make it too short, you end up incentivizing publishers to screw over their creators as the copyright term will mostly be eaten up by the time it takes to produce something in the first place.

Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.

> Mr. Martin was also paid to support the production of GoT, not just royalties. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn't be called to do the same sort of consulting work on the script, dialogues, visual, etc if the copyright expired.

I find it highly probable that the negotiation for the rights to adapt for the screen included contractual agreements for him to do so to prevent them from hiring someone cheaper who would screw with his intended vision. He had leverage to ensure this outcome. They didn’t pay him a great deal more than they could have paid some unknown name because they are nice and friendly.