3 ms·

Way too long for why? I don't believe citizens are harmed by not being able to make money from something they didn't create.

coldpie 11y ago
Really? Copyright is siloing off culture in unprecedented ways. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is under copyright by his estate, and will be until the 2040s. It can't be used by anyone without paying (large) licensing fees to his estate, even though they had literally nothing to do with the creation of the speech. Ever notice how restaurants and movies never use "the Happy Birthday song"? That's because Warner Bros claimed copyright on it for decades. Another part of our culture that can't be used thanks to copyright. There are plenty of films, plays, and TV series based on works in the public domain. Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Sherlock Holmes to name just a few that come to mind. Should those creators be required to pay tribute to the descendants of the long-dead authors in order to use those parts of our shared culture?
- pluma 11y ago
  A famous stained-glass window in a church in my home town was heavily censored (i.e. publishing photographs of it resulted in legal threats, fair use or not) because the estate of the late artist who created it vigorously enforced his copyright. High-resolution photographs were available for free of every stained-glass window on the church website, except for this one. At times there were even talks about covering it up physically because of claims about public display licensing issues. The artist in question likely didn't see any of this coming during his lifetime. Being granted exclusive protections during your lifetime or for a reasonable period of time after the creation of a work is defensible. De facto perpetual protections afforded to the artist's grandchildren (or great^n-grandchildren), not so much.
pluma 11y ago
Until you realize the source material that made Disney what it is today is mostly in the public domain (while even their oldest adaptations aren't and -- if Disney have their will -- never will be). Could Disney have become this successful without free access to public domain works like Cinderella, Snow White, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and so on and so forth? Possibly. But insisting that their works should be protected far beyond the protections their source material ever had is hypocrisy at best, anti-competitive at worst.

coldpie 11y ago

Really? Copyright is siloing off culture in unprecedented ways. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is under copyright by his estate, and will be until the 2040s. It can't be used by anyone without paying (large) licensing fees to his estate, even though they had literally nothing to do with the creation of the speech. Ever notice how restaurants and movies never use "the Happy Birthday song"? That's because Warner Bros claimed copyright on it for decades. Another part of our culture that can't be used thanks to copyright. There are plenty of films, plays, and TV series based on works in the public domain. Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, and Sherlock Holmes to name just a few that come to mind. Should those creators be required to pay tribute to the descendants of the long-dead authors in order to use those parts of our shared culture?

pluma 11y ago
A famous stained-glass window in a church in my home town was heavily censored (i.e. publishing photographs of it resulted in legal threats, fair use or not) because the estate of the late artist who created it vigorously enforced his copyright. High-resolution photographs were available for free of every stained-glass window on the church website, except for this one. At times there were even talks about covering it up physically because of claims about public display licensing issues. The artist in question likely didn't see any of this coming during his lifetime. Being granted exclusive protections during your lifetime or for a reasonable period of time after the creation of a work is defensible. De facto perpetual protections afforded to the artist's grandchildren (or great^n-grandchildren), not so much.

pluma 11y ago

Until you realize the source material that made Disney what it is today is mostly in the public domain (while even their oldest adaptations aren't and -- if Disney have their will -- never will be). Could Disney have become this successful without free access to public domain works like Cinderella, Snow White, Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, One Thousand and One Nights, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and so on and so forth? Possibly. But insisting that their works should be protected far beyond the protections their source material ever had is hypocrisy at best, anti-competitive at worst.