Copyright should expire well before the death of the author. If I was king, it would be more like 20 years from release.
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As someone who used to make art, I canât agree with that approach. Part of copyright is also controlling your own work. Otherwise, film companies could wait until that award-winning novel you made when you were young turned 20, then make a film without your consent and pocket all the profits.
Being able to control your own art is important, and I have no problem with artists making money off their own work while theyâre alive. But once theyâre dead, what they contributed should benefit all humankind. I like to imagine this is what Lee would have wanted.
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The point is that this is assigned for schools so, one assumes, the school districts are purchasing these. I doubt theyâre ordered from the second hand market.
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This is where weâll have to agree to disagree. In my opinion the cultural friction that results from long copyright terms is more important than the need for artists to die without seeing their works transformed. My personal peeve is with obtaining copyright clearances for imagery appearing in museum exhibitions. Iâve seen person-years consumed just on a single exhibition.
Maybe at least this will finally put a dent in that bookâs undeserved eminence.
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How else can we teach kids that only white folks can save black folks?
Oh yeahâŚ
And almost every story about racism ever! [meme credit to George Takei]
ETA: I do think the book is exceptional storytelling, but I agree that the way itâs taught, as the white savior myth, has been the real and unfortunate reason for itâs preeminent position is school curricula.
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I hear that âGo set a watchmanâ administers a bit of a corrective.
(Breathed revived the strip after remembering some fan maiil that Harper Lee sent him asking him to reprieve Opus)
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Iâm usually not fan of much of anything that Orson Scott Card has to say these days, but he gave a really good concise breakdown of the problems with copyright terms. I pretty much agree with his argument for lifetime+20 years. I canât find the post right now, but I seem to remember John Scalzi arguing for a similar length at one point on his blog.
I donât agree with the idea of tying term to having children though. That unfairly penalizes people who are unable or choose not to have children. And besides, while our first is on her way, I didnât know until relatively recently whether I would ever have children, but I would have and could have named my sisterâs children as my heirs if I hadnât.
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It does indeed. The article I linked in my earlier comment makes some interesting points about the Watchman Atticus Finch.
Good thing youâre not king, then. Seriously, you want to dictate how long I can make a living from my work?
Iâm being polite, here, instead of extremely succinct.
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Meh, not really. IIRC, itâs just a first draft of what became Mockingbird, and not a good draft at that. Lee changed Finch from a nasty racist to a saintly (though not especially fired-up) white liberal, and voila, white publisher and white readers ate it up.
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Iâve been told, and I donât know if this is true, that Watchman might have been published against Leeâs wishes.
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our first is on her way
Congrats!!!
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It seems to me that royalties are part of a writerâs retirement after a hopefully productive career. I would think that income would be more important in those golden years than whenever it was first published.
To me, the problem with current copyright is laws are that theyâre structured to benefit publishers, not artists. Iâm cool with some negotiation on how long heirs can benefit (though I think 20 years is a nice round number and about as high as it should ever go). But lifetime of the artist should be the baseline. Companies like Disney are trying to turn it into lifetime of the publishing corporation, and theyâre clearly trying for and succeeding at grabbing indefinite copyright terms through incremental corruption of legislation and secret trade pacts.
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Oh, I dig that, yeah, but thatâs not what would-be King futnuh said. Thereâs a vast difference between working to modify corporate personhood in the context copyright law and telling an author - not a corporation, a person - âYouâve made enough off of this, now it belongs to all of us.â
(And not for nothing, if you end up with a publishing contract that assigns copyright to the publisher, youâve got a shitty contract, and if youâve got an agent, a shitty one of those, too. Things ainât the way they used to be.)
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I think a lot of the breakdown in and polarization of the discussion around copyright is how utterly shafted people feel by companies like Disney. Publishers go one way, and activists go the other in response, and you end up with two sides moving further from reason rather than towards it, but one, the corporations, have the money to buy the laws they want regardless, and gladly screw over authors and other artists as well as all the rest of us. Because the discussion becomes activists vs publishers, people forget about the authorsâ legitimate interests until the publishers pretend to care about authors to shanghai them as a shield against criticism without their consent or real interests at heart. So when I read something like @futnuh wrote, I allow for the very real possibility that it was born of frustration with publishers, not with artists making a living.
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It doesnât really penalise the person unable to have children, since they would be dead and unable to benefit anyhow. Life+20? I certainly wouldnât campaign against that. Itâs more definite.Youngest Child+18 raises the possibility of unknown or posthumous children born through donation.
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It just seems simpler. Plus, I think part of the reason for allowing a modest posthumous extension is to enable the author to bequeath some financial security to their heirs, and I just think itâs better not to favor biological children over otherwise chosen heirs, even if those heirs arenât the authorsâ legal children.
We may have to revisit this if the rich start living for centuries, but thatâs another bridge to cross when we come to it. Of course the way things are going now, copyright will devolve to immortal corporations before long anyhow, and the whole system will be perverted.
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I donât see the author nor the American people nor the country in any way benefiting from this kind of copyright law.
How on earth does it make sense at all?!?
This is how you know your laws are written by (and for) the investor class.
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Adding to what youâve said, tying copyright to children would be weirdly⌠regressive, I guess. Ulysses S. Grant wrote his autobiography while he was dying of cancer to provide support to his family. Under the proposition to tie it to children, a person could do that for kids, but not for a spouse or a disabled sibling, and certainly not for a cherished cause.
The example of Grant shows that if the intention of copyright is to promote the arts, having copyright potentially vanish at death will lower or remove that effect. Iâm also not sure that I like the idea that the IP value of the work of an old or unhealthy person would be much less than that of a young and healthy person.
Iâd be prepared to go with a term of 25 years renewable once, despite disliking the idea of living artists losing control of their early works.
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