Comment by inanutshellus
Comment by inanutshellus a day ago
> they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
~Upton Sinclair
Would the original creator prefer to rest on his laurels and collect checks instead? yep.
Would all the hundreds of people out there wanting to innovate on that copyrighted idea also like to make a buck? yep.
It's all a balance of competing interests.
Well. It's supposed to be.
Copyright has nothing to do with innovation. That's patents (publish your tech secrets in exchange for exclusive use for a period of time). Copyright is about protecting creative works, which are, by their nature, much much easier to copy than to make. If I write a book, and bring it to book printer to print 10,000 copies, I think we can all agree we prefer the world where that printshop can't turn around and print as many copies as they want, selling them themselves, and never paying me a dime. So I need some legal concept that says my creative work is mine alone to copy, that I can sell exceptions to.
Comparatively, society loses out on a lot less with long copyright terms compared to long patent terms. Long patent terms stifle innovation, long copyright terms just mean I can't freely distribute my own copies of others' art.
IMO, the happy compromise would be a tapering of copyright over time. For the first, say, 2 decades, you have contemporary copyrights. You can choose who to license your rights to, including the production of derivative works and the like. For the next 2 decades after that, a price is codified such that you still are guaranteed a cut (variable on whether the work is a verbatim copy, an adaption, or something significantly different). For the next 2 decades after THAT, you get a smaller cut, and non-commercial use becomes a free-for-all. After 80 years, it's a free-for-all.