I dunno about that. I think there should be a minimum term of, say, 15 years, so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve.
If I died one month after starting a new programming job, my employer wouldn't pay a salary to my family for 15 years.
I'm not sure why society has to take care of the family of an author but not a programmer.
Death or 15 years seems fair to me.
IP is more about property than a job, I think.
Nice trick, that.
Hereditary transfer of IP is a bizarre anachronism.
General searching around turns up these numbers here and there as well. Assuming that is in fact true, _most_ people shouldn't be giving up anything in estate taxes.
Estate taxes in the US are 40% and the first ~$5 million in value is exempt. So its impossible to lose most of any estate to estate taxes in the US, and very few estates (0.14% [1]) are subject to any estate tax at all.
Considering two extreme cases:
Author A writes something incredibly popular and dies the moment he wrote the last word. His children end up in the poor house because they don't get any royalties from sales.
Author B writes something incredibly popular at the age of 15 and is still living large off his royalties at the ripe old age of 100.
If you just set it to, say, 20 years and it's done (or IMO better would be an exponentially increasing fee for renewal, $1 for the first year, $2 for the second, $4 for the third, etc.) then it seems to be more predictable and cleaner.
It corrupts the copyright deal to some extent. Copyright in part is to encourage creation of new works in the hope that they will benefit society. If we (the people) allow authors to rest on their laurels we potentially deprive ourselves of much of the benefit that could be elicited from their creativity. We also to some extent lock up important works that would otherwise allow the inspiration of others - creators of derivative works - to be rewarded.
We want to reward creativity, but not so much so that those who happen to have societally enriching creativity don't need to exercise it more than once!
It's much easier to just do a standard, fixed term for all copyrights.
In order to do that, you have to have a central authority that actually keeps track of copyrighted works, who owns the rights to it, if they've been extended, if the fees have been paid, etc. On top of that, you need to think about the broke independent author who can't afford to extend the copyright on that 5th year because they got a divorce, got in a car accident, and landed in the hospital. Or the high schooler who wrote a book for NANOWRIMO, self-publishes it, but doesn't know the first thing about copyright law or needing to continually do extensions. The copyright inevitably lapses, and some publisher finds it, likes it, and starts printing copies and selling them because it's in the public domain.
I really, honestly believe that we need to reform copyright, but I also think we need make sure that it doesn't favour people with money and people with access to intimate knowledge of copyright law. I think everyone probably has at least one copyrighted work to their name, so we should make it a goal that just about everyone should be able to understand copyright.
Of course, "that's how it was" doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. But it's not completely disastrous.
I think most of your objections would be solved by a sort of hybrid system that I hinted at. Don't start the exponential renewal until the 20 year mark. If you haven't learned about the need for renewal by then, you clearly don't need it. Start it at a dollar, so it's a tiny barrier for anyone making any money at year 20.
By year 30 it'll be a thousand dollars, and by year 40 it'll be a million. This will start to scare off small time folks who aren't making a ton of money. Highly profitable properties will be able to afford the fees for a while longer, although year 50 will hit a billion dollars a year, and soon after it'll exceed the GDP of most countries.
So in essence, it breaks down to a 20-year period for even the worst crap, a ~30 year period for obscure but selling works, a 40 year period for properties that continue to be fairly profitable, and maybe a 50 year period for Mickey Mouse class stuff.
I think 20-30 years should be plenty to figure out how profitable something is going to be, so it shouldn't much depend on how much money people had before, but how much they can make from the work. If we consider that a proxy for how valuable the work is to society (a bad proxy to be sure, but perhaps better than nothing) then why not allow profitable works to last longer? Make some money for Uncle Sam too.
I still think we need to make sure that we keep very good records with this registry, however. I could foresee more instances like we have with Happy Birthday if we don't do a good job of it.
Advertisers and branding wouldn't find much use for them because they were public domain. They gain value from these things by limiting the use through exclusive deals enabled by copyright.
That's one way advertisers can gain value from using a character. Exclusivity strengthens the association between the character and the product being advertised. Without exclusivity, many advertising characters probably would indeed be of little value and advertisers would probably not use them. I think, though, that this would mostly apply to characters that were created for advertising, or that were outside characters that were not very significant to the public.
If the Michelin Man were used to pitch donuts, for example, I'd find it weird, because I only associate the Michelin Man with Michelin tires.
However, for characters that had significant public interest before they were used in advertising, I don't think exclusivity is very important. For instance, Michael Phelps (yes, I know he is a real person, not a character, but that doesn't change the point) has done ads for Subway Sandwiches and for Speedo, and I don't think either diminishes the other.
So, I think the cultural terror you refer to is the status quo even with effectively perpetual copyright.
Sure, if you are going to be hyperspecific about that one particular example and that one specific use, but the issue was more general about works, and, as for that work, while it may not used to promote toys and junk food, its first titular character is used in rather ubiquitous window decals that seem to present at least as much of the same problem.
The cultural context for a succesful work, with regard to its specific characters, but also more generally, is never going to be the same when you want to introduce your kids to it as when you were introduced to it yourself, particularly if you encountered the work when it was first introduced to society (or when first became popular, which may not be the same time).
Trying to restrict other people's freedom in order to preserve that cultural context -- as by adovcating long copyright terms for that purpose -- is never going to work.
Long copyright terms seem to be doing just fine for Bill Watterson.
Not, it wasn't. It made the following general claim about a problem that would exist without long-term copyright:
>> That would make it so just around the time your kids are old enough for you to introduce them to the great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood it would enter the public domain and become widely used in advertising and low budget productions. <<
> Long copyright terms seem to be doing just fine for Bill Watterson.
Perhaps its doing fine for him, but its not preventing characters -- Calvin particularly -- from Calvin and Hobbes from being ubiquitously used in our culture in a way which shifts the context in which someone newly introduced to the source works might experience them. Sure, its not specifically "marketing toys and junk food", but rather expressing preferences, but its not fundamentally different from the perspective of the kind of cultural context concern raised generally in the post I was responding to.
Hardly limited to those two (either as locations or subject matter), but, sure, that's one aspect of the use.
> Those stickers are counterfeit.
Irrelevant to the cultural point under discussion, which has to do with what potential future people may be bombarded with in their environment before seeing the source work, not what is legally considered genuine or counterfeit.
> They've been the subject of legal action, and if they aren't today, it's because Watterson doesn't care enough to go after their small-potatoes producers.
Whether Watterson cares is, again, irrelevant, since the issue raised wasn't about the concerns of creators, but how extended copyright protects fans of work from having their children subjected to various forms of unwanted portrayals of the character, etc., of the work before those fans are able to introduce those children to the work in general. Both the specific kinds of unwanted portrayals pointed to as examples ("TV pitchmen for toys and junk food") of the general problem for the general class of works at issue ("great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood") and similar ubiquitous cultural portrayals not effectively controlled by the author (the stickers) for the specific work cited as an example ("Calvin & Hobbes"), so I don't think that there is much evidence that the current effectively-perpetual copyright does much to prevent the general problem being pointed to.
Even if that problem is agreed to be a problem whose prevention warrants government action restricting human freedom (a position I think is itself far from uncontroversial), I think its pretty clear that the existing copyright regime isn't an effective intervention to acheive that end, and so cannot be justified as a solution to that problem.
20 years is not nearly as long as it sounds. Harry Potter, for instance, is already 17 years old. I bet a lot of advertisers 3 years from now would jump on the chance to use Harry Potter characters.
On another note, it doesn't affect your point all that much, but while Harry Potter the character would go into the public domain in 2017, the first movie wouldn't go into the public domain until 2021. In that interval, you could use the characters but you couldn't replicate their likenesses from the movies without some sort of agreement.
But would this not increase the incentive to harm authors? If the author dies, film studios/HBO etc no longer have to pay for movie/TV rights to out-of-copyright work.
But why should we link death with the release of copyright? While temptation of assassination is probably reduced with extra-long copyright duration after death of author, it's a lot saner to assign a fixed-duration copyright from the original release date, not from (whole life of author + fixed duration). The problem goes away if you have a fixed duration from the start.
2) Isn't someone who holds a copyright other than the creator (say in this example the Conan Doyle estate) profiting from the work of others?
3) Like all sensible issues, deciding the proper term of copyright should be understood as a set of tradeoffs. Longer copyright terms may encourage more creative work by increasing the payoff, may give authors more creative control in how their creations are used and so forth. Shorter copyright terms may encourage more creative work by reducing the cost of remixing other's ideas, can provide a common pool of cultural resources for all to draw on, and so forth. What is necessary is to try to balance these competing interests against each other. It is not that shorter copyright terms are "automatically better", but I (and apparently many others in this thread) strongly believe that the balance right now has copyright terms that are too long to be socially beneficial.