There are many who say that a dog has his day,
And a cat has a number of lives;
There are others who think that a lobster is pink,
And that bees never work in their hives.
The Collected Works of Dylan Thomas (Courtesy of Australia’s Project Gutenberg – where copyright expires 50 years after the death of the author)
Not in that collection, though, is the first poem Dylan Thomas ever published, at age 11. The Song of the Mischievous Dog (Scroll down to the third page.)
Copyright:
a privilege that society extends to a person
when that person has been particularly blessed (or chosen) by God
to be the instrument for the expression of God’s genius.
Copyright as enacted:
a sinful wrong-taking of God’s gifts, a misappropriation
that creates excessive wealth in the hands of profiteers,
with the intent of making the living worship the dead.
The Loving God of the Living People abhors copyrights, as perversions.
I think Victor Hugo had it right. He fought simultaneously for the creation of copyright (one of the leaders behind the original Berne Convention) and for the creation of a “public domain of letters”
I don’t feel copyright should expire at death – it is morally just for one to expect one’s creative work to benefit a spouse/children. However, there is no need for the grandchildren or great grandchildren to benefit.
Death+Fifty is a sane, moral, and just limit.
It is morally just for “children” to benefit. Yes, indeed, as long as we both agree that a child is a person under the age of 18. So, we could say, copyright extends until none of a creator’s immediate family remains legally dependent upn the creator’s estate, and then it ceases, immediately — as when the spouse dies or the last child reaches maturity (and is a competent adult).
Now, in the real world, the question is the marketability of a copyright — of how long you can have it before it vanishes. Industry prefers to refer to a fixed and specifiable term — for then a present value can be calculated — the intangible becomes as reliable as a tangible thing — for purposes of buying and selling, for promotional purposes such as advertisements.
However, the privilege of a copyright, as it states in the Constitution, is a protection granted by government, for a limited, reasonable time — not to make the creator rich or wealthy, but to see that he (she) receives some small compensation — not just as much as he can millk out of it, for as long as can can bribe the government, to extend even further his privileges.
Make no mistake about it. Extending the copyright as far as we have works to cheapen a culture, to dummy it down, so that new works have to compete even harder against the entrenched mediocrity of the past, which would long ago have faded from the public’s eye were it not for the privileged advantages that copyright confers on their “cultural” suvivability, as icons (or totems) of the culture.
Make no mistake about it. Copyright is a use of a government power, to interfere with the natural course of the distribution of ideas, in material forms — for ideas (at least mine!) are like a gaseous vapor, their natural distribution being to radiate outwards and to disperse. I should think every conservative would hate the use of governmental power to interfere in the natural course of the economy of ideas. But, oh, no, you never hear a single conservative ranting and raving about these privileges conferred and protected only by governmental power.
Call this my MICKEY_MOUSE_OUGHT_TO_BE_PUBLIC_DOMAIN argument.