Copyright has a hilariously convoluted story. The term is from England, but many of the rules are from France. Because in France they came up with "rights of t

Copyright has a hilariously convoluted story. The term is from England, but many of the rules are from France. Because in France they came up with "rights of the creator" that included things like the estate being able to deny someone the use of a play or song after the creators death. Then these two got merged via the Berne convention on copyright. But USA didn't sing that one until the 1980s(!). So for a long long time, USA used a variant of the English copyright law, that only concerned itself with the printing of books (then as the tech came online, they expanded it to cover the likes of recorded music and computer software). One thing to keep in mind is that the Berne convention requires that the signatory nations respect copyright duration of the nation of first release. And thanks to France we have this whole thing about death plus X years. And like i said, USA didn't sign any of that until very recently. And thus we had situations like Tolkien becoming popular with hippies because an American publisher picked up a copy while visiting the UK, and went on to print a pile of cheap copies back in the US. Anyways, thanks to global media corporations, lobbyists, and the whole Berne thing, we now have a constant ratcheting of the whole death+X duration thanks to the lobbyists playing on national fears of being out-competed by others with "better" terms for the corporations. IANAL and all that.