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Because otherwise, Fitzgerald wouldn't have or have had any incentive to invest in creative work?
by wwweston 14y ago
Because otherwise, Fitzgerald wouldn't have or have had any incentive to invest in creative work?
- CamperBob2 14y agoHow long should he or his estate be allowed to milk the cash cow?
- jlgreco 14y ago"What's that? You mean in 2013 people will be able to read my book for free? Well fuck it, I'll just go have another drink instead." (Actually to be fair, I don't think "instead" is quite the right word there.)
- DanBC 14y agoDon't joke. Disney honestly think like that. When home video was introduced they couldn't get their heads round the fact that they wouldn't know how many people would be sitting round the tv watching a movie, and thus Disney wouldn't be able to charge all of these people. Some of them would be watching for free! Disney have introduced things like single watch video tape (need to be sent back somewhere to be rewound); limited life DVD (special materials, sent in sealed envelope, as soon as it's opened it starts to oxidise); and they still have pretty horrible unskippable trailers and warnings and etc.
- jlgreco 14y agoEh, in the case of Disney it seems more like they are worried about copyright terms for their stuff ending imminently, not in a hundred or so years. That's why they only threw on a few more decades (of course I expect them to go at it again when that extra time runs out) and didn't start that fight much earlier than they did. They still made that stuff after all, even during a time when copyrights were shorter, then they decided to get it raised.
- 300bps 14y agoMy objection to Disney is that (as the article states) they built a large portion of their business by taking works in the public domain and creating derivative works. They then slammed the door behind them by repeatedly lobbying for extended copyrights any time their 85 year old Mickey Mouse comes close to being out of copyright. There's a reason why the copyright extension act is commonly referred to as The Mickey Mouse Protection Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
- dublinben 14y agoThe worst part about these extensions is that Disney's valuable characters are all (perpetually) protected by trademark. Extending the copyright on hundred year old movies only prevents them from being widely enjoyed.
- 300bps 14y ago>limited life DVD I remember well the original DIVX at Circuit City: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX I honestly think that failure was a huge reason why Circuit City failed. They built up so much ill will from a technically literate audience.
- jlgreco 14y agoDIVX is a fascinating piece of history. One of the first "always on" DRM systems meant for common consumers, and it failed spectacularly.
- DanBC 14y agoWow. I was talking about (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexplay) so there's a few different systems around. > Flexplay is a trademark for a DVD-compatible optical video disc format with a time-limited (usually 48-hour) playback time. They are often described as "self-destructing" although the disc merely turns black and does not physically disintegrate. The same technology was used by Disney's Buena Vista Home Entertainment under the name ez-D.
- Pxtl 14y agoActually, in recent years Disney has been hitting it out of the park, at least for children's features, when it comes to their DVD front-matter. They respect the "title menu" button and even pop up the absurdly-named "fastplay" option before the trailers explaining that you just hit "enter" to jump to the DVD menu (the ridiculous "fastplay" option really means "play all the trailers then immediately play the feature film, like you'd experience at the movie theatre - no menu appears". While it's got some silly doublespeak there, the end result is that the DVD actually lets me skip the trailers. I have a lot of other children's movies that I have to mash the "skip" button or even (horror of horrors) have to fast forward the front-matter.
- DanBC 14y agoThat's good to hear!
- jopof 14y agoYou are referring to Disney a corporation, not Disney or any other person.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 14y agoBig difference between a company like Disney and an author. Copyrights should NEVER be transferable. At best, large corporations should enter limited time partnerships to promote their books (or music).
- tsotha 14y agoIf copyrights aren't transferable authors can't sell their books. That's not going to work very well.
- belorn 14y agoAuthors already do exclusive deals with publisher. Such deals do not need to transfer copyright at all, as its all under contract law. If I make a contract with someone that says I get exclusivity to publish and sell their works, and in return I give them some money, in what way do we need to do copyright assignments?
- cygx 14y agoIf I make a contract with someone that says I get exclusivity to publish and sell their works, and in return I give them some money, in what way do we need to do copyright assignments? You don't, and in Germany, there's no such thing as copyright assignment - Urheberrecht is part of the author's moral rights and inalienable[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Germany#Transfer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Germany#Transf...
- tsotha 14y agoAs a practical matter, how is that different than assigning the copyright?
- rthomas6 14y agoThe issue discussed in TFA is not copyright, but how long copyrights should apply before they expire. Is 73 years after an author's death long enough?
- wwweston 14y agoWell, clearly, without at least that period of time, Fitzgerald would not have thought writing Gatsby to be worth it, right?
- jopof 14y agoSarcasm still doesn't work on the Internet.
- jlgreco 14y ago1) I would love to hear you try to explain how that logically follows. 2) Copyright as it was when the book was written: It allowed for works to be copyrighted for a period of 28 years from the date of publication. Like the Copyright Act of 1790 before it, the copyrighted work could be renewed once for a second term of equal value.
- Tiktaalik 14y agoAt that time, assuming that I'm correct and the relevant legislation was the Copyright act of 1909, the term was 28 years, and one could renew once for additional 28 years. http://www.kasunic.com/1909_act.htm http://www.kasunic.com/1909_act.htm
- pasquinelli 14y agoi wonder if any author anywhere ever has decided not to write a book because of copyright issues. and, if you let me get a little counterfactual here, i wonder if that book, had they written it, would've not been garbage. but really, it's the publisher that needs the incentive to invest in fitzgerald's creative work that copyright is about here, yeah?
- duskwuff 14y agoAlmost certainly never. I'd guess that most books go out of print (and stop making money) within a decade or two of being written. It's only a vanishingly small fraction of works that are so incredibly successful that they stay in print and continue making the author (or their estate) significant royalties beyond the author's lifetime. Looking at it this way, I'm thinking that paid copyright renewals are the right way to go. Have the initial copyright last maybe 10 years, then require the rights holder to pay a small fee (something like $50, maybe?) to renew the copyright for another decade. If a work isn't making the author at least $5 a year, it probably belongs in the public domain.
- pasquinelli 14y agoyeah, but if the copyright holder were, say, disney, then they would just perpetually renew it, because even if it isn't making them money now doesn't mean that wouldn't want to make it into a line of merchandise and its associated movie sometime down the line.
- Kliment 14y agoWhich is fine. Let their works die off while others flourish.
- duskwuff 14y agoThen make the renewal fee double (or something) each time it's renewed. Eventually the cost of renewing the copyright will be more than it's worth to the rights holder. In any case, the fact that there is a deep-pocketed rights holder for those works means that those works are being cared for, to some degree at least. The ones we really have to worry about right now are those that are lost and forgotten before their copyright expires.
- betterunix 14y agoMy mother manages to do railroad work without a guarantee that her great-grandchildren will continue to be paid for those labors. What makes Fitzgerald different?
- damoncali 14y agoIf your mother created a railroad things might be different, no?
- betterunix 14y agoMaybe, but most people seem to draw issue with "trust fund babies" and people who are born into wealth. Society does not need people living on their ancestors' fortunes, it needs people who do useful work. Copyright exists for the benefit of society; how does society benefit by being forced to pay the descendants of F. Scott Fitzgerald just to produce copies of his work? Copyright terms were extended after The Great Gatsby was written, so it is entirely bogus to claim that we might not have it without the absurdly long copyright terms we have today.
- zanny 14y ago> Copyright exists for the benefit of society Let us be honest, it hasn't existed for this purpose for 30+ years. It now exists to protect corporate profit centers and main franchises that big business doesn't want to enter public domain so other people could distribute their work for free and create derivatives without getting sued into oblivion.
- nine_k 14y agoLike, well, * built* a railroad? Builders usually walk away and take another building contract, without being eternally paid for what they have built.
- alexqgb 14y agoRight, but the owners of the RR continue to charge rent in perpetuity. The difference between straight labor and creative work is that the artist is, in theory, building an exploitable asset. They only time they get paid directly for their labor (and labor alone) is when they're operating under a work for hire agreement (e.g. a major studio movie). In this case, the vast armies of cast and crew are just like the RR workers. They clock in, do their day, get paid for that - and only that - then move on to the next job. It's a rare instance where a capital-intensive creative work (which can include novels when you factor the cost of print runs, distribution, and promotion) don't involve the backers insisting on substantial control. In this sense, it's pretty similar to VCs backing startups. If the creative talent manages to self-fund and self-distribute, it's not that they're getting paid over and over for one effort. They're commending royalties because they managed to play several roles at once.
- wtallis 14y agoThat argument doesn't really work when discussing copyright extensions that were proposed and passed after the author's death. Fitzgerald wrote what he did expecting the copyright protections available at the time. Extending copyright while he was still alive could have provided him incentive to create more works, but extensions after his death couldn't.
- wwweston 14y ago> Fitzgerald wrote what he did expecting the copyright protections available at the time. Well, OK. That just proves he didn't need 70 to "forever less one day" in order to write it. But the evidence is strongly on the side that he needed at least 50 years. I mean, did you see him writing Gatsby before the 1909 copyright act? No, you didn't, because before that, he'd have somewhere around 40 piddling years of copyright protection. But the 1909 act passes and sure enough, Gatsby comes out less than 15 years later.
- Jtsummers 14y agoHow is that evidence? Considering that much of the content of the book was based on the time it was written and published in, it would not have been written in 1909. Is my sarcasm detector off? Or are you just a really bizarre troll?
- jlgreco 14y agoAre you for real? Fitzgerald did not right the Great Gatsby before 1909 because in 1909 he was 13 years old. If you have any sources about Fitzgerald's take on copyright terms I would love to read them, but without that you have absolutely no basis with which to say that there is "strong evidence" that he required more than 50 years.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]