raniE
Big Bearded Guy
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2019
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I don’t think it’s a special privilege compared to a doctor or a bricklayer, the difference is that a creator has an entirely different income scheme than a bricklayer or a doctor. They’re paid constantly, a novelist or a painter almost certainly isn’t.I do not accept the argument that the children of artists and writers deserve a legal privilege that none of the rest of us get. When I see my doctor I pay him on the spot and that's that: he gets rich and his children flourish without my having to pay repeatedly for decades. The bricklayers who built my house got paid in 1965, and it was up to them to save for their retirements and to endow their children if they wanted to. I don't go on paying rent to the children of the builder even though my house still produces accommodation services.
Writers, composers, and recording artists need a term of copyright to capture the value of their creation because we do not pay them a lump sum on publication. The term cannot be limited to their life because if it were elderly and ailing artists could not get paid. But their children, or in Tolkien's case great-gandchildren, don't have anything to do with it.
I consider my concern to be pragmatic too. Pragmatically, the current excessive term of copyright makes works unavailable to the audiences without producing royalties for the artists' children, wages for the printers, interest for the owners of the presses, or anything for anyone. Works from the 1880s are more likely to be in print than works from the 1980s. (Citations: HOW COPYRIGHT KEEPS WORKS DISAPPEARED, The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish).
It seems to me that the pragmatic thing to do would be to commission a study of the way that royalties income for a work tends in fact to vary over time, and then to set a term of copyright that allowed writers and artists (in general, not case-by-case) to capture 90% or 95% of the net present value (at time of publication) of expected future royalties.
While I have my ranting hat on, and before everybody realises that this is getting political, I will note Eldred v. Ashcroft is a garbage decision: an extension of the term of copyright after the work is published is too late to provide an incentive to the writer to produce the work already produced, and therefore does not promote the progress of arts and science. Congress has the power to create copyright and patent protections only to promote the progress etc.