COPYRIGHTS- Save the whales! - uh er~ Save the Grammars!

I ran across this link today. Evidently there are forces of good working against the evil of the Sunny Bono Act. We can do something, hopefully, to gain access to a huge cache of copyrighted information if this movement picks up.

http://eldred.cc/

I wonder if people will bother to lengthen the copyright of Greek and Latin texts. People don’t seem to be too interested in those… What I don’t quite understand about this copyright system is what happens to books after the copyright has run out :confused: .

I’m not sure that anything “happens to them”; the actual, physical books are still there, but the use of the material is no longer exclusive to the author/copyright holder.

So that would mean anyone could publish that book? Hmm… think I might just become a publisher and sell old popular books then :stuck_out_tongue:

I get antsy around copyright change suggestions. I don’t favor extending it, but I’m not sure I favor this, either.

In practice what happens when copyright runs out is that publishers can no longer have a monopoly over the item and so are much less likely to publish it. In the age of the internet, though, that’s not so much of a problem.

Does anyone know if there are any laws that let a creator govern what can and cannot be done with their work, even after the copyright has expired? I hate it when people try to make movies out of books; the two are separate mediums, and repel each other like oil and water. Is there any way I can keep my books from being made into movies, or will they be completely out of my control and out of my heirs’ control 70 years after I’m dead? (I don’t want them made into movies even after I’m dead!)

Nope, to my knowledge there’s nothing you can do about that. This is why copyrights expire, to prevent an author from having unlimited control. I know this sounds bad to you, but in fact it is a really good thing… as soon as people have unlimited control over the sharing of information, education and society in general will suffer.

And if the book world is anything like the music world, you will lose a great deal of control anyway as soon as you sign a book over to the publisher. Artists rarely have any say over what happens to their work after they sign that contract.

I’m with klewlis. I’m not an IP lawyer, but/so I think it’s a good thing that copyright and moral rights expire. Except for their intimate connection with financial rights, there is no obvious reason why moral (as opposed to financial) rights should pass to heirs, at all. (Other ‘personality’ protecting rights, such as defamation and privacy die with you.) There is not even any strong likelihood that your heirs (lacking your talent, but loving your money) will wish to prevent the ruthless exploitation of your legacy for merely financial gain.

Human nature is capricious when it comes to exercising or attempting to exercise rights from beyond the grave. Heirs are notoriously faithless – en masse and in the long run: I say nothing of particular individuals – to anything other than self interest. Would I like to see Plato trademarked (Plato’s coffee bar … an ideal cup) or official editions of Virgil (the official Dido and Aeneas dating agency)? Absolutely not. The time comes when books, like children, should be set free, for good or ill. One or at most two generations from their creator is as much as it needs.