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Eternal Copyright: a modest proposal
[Quote]:
Imagine you’re a new parent at 30 years old and you’ve just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the “public good”, simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they’d just make it worse.
No, it’s clear that our current copyright law is inadequate and unfair. We must move to Eternal Copyright – a system where copyright never expires, and a world in which we no longer snatch food out of the mouths of our creators’ descendants. With eternal copyright, the knowledge that our great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond will benefit financially from our efforts will no doubt spur us on to achieve greater creative heights than ever seen before.
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And they say “you can’t take it with you” – Hah! We’ll show them!
FWIW, I think that an original copyright should only be granted to a person (flesh and blood type, SCOTUS decisions not withstanding), and all assignments and assigned benefits thereof be terminated upon the death of the ORIGINAL copyright holder. IE, the period would be flexible, but limited to the lifetime of the original holder + additional time up to 20 years after their death up to 20 years, depending upon how long it was held. If they are 80 when the copyright was granted, then it will be a short span (+ 20 years)! If 20, then not so much (+ 0 years)! However, in the long term, it will benefit society much better than our current “abortion” of a copyright law.
Good idea. However, the artists sell off their creations to organizations who work to extract “value” from those “assets”. Now we have serious concentration of financial interests that will ensure that such sensible measures cannot be implemented, short of a revolution.