If the goal is to ensure creatives can make a living at creating things that are trivial to copy, 14 years may be too short. And registering for renewals strikes me as an unnecessary fig leaf to entrenched publishers (who else would have the money or inclination to register and pay for such?).
Consider that "A Game of Thrones" was published 16 years ago, but its sales only really started taking off last year. I feel like it would be a shame if George R. R. Martin, who is still alive and writing the series, was getting absolutely nothing from this surge of interest.
Some creative works simply take a while to get going in the culture. I don't think we should punish creative folks who are, for lack of a better term, "ahead of their time." Obviously this concept could be taken to an absurd extreme, but I would argue that 25 years is better than 14. It's at least closer to the duration of a full human generation.
He could still be selling paperback versions, or he could have licensed the franchise (which he should have a trademark on) to HBO for the tv series. He would still have control of the brand name of A Game of Thrones, if his copyright on it expired it would just mean anyone who owns the first book could reproduce and sell it themselves, and anyone who wants to make a derivative work could do so.
But they would not necessarily be able to use the name "Game of Thrones" in the title, because thats a trademark. As long as he is alive he has that name available to him to distribute as he wishes.
I feel 5 year copyright + ability to renew it once for a total 10 year duration is plenty of time for government sponsored monopoly on distribution and derivation. Because that is all copyright is. But thanks to that system, almost any fan made Star Wars work is technically violating George Lucas' copyright on everything in the universe he made, and he could realistically sue a truckload of fan sites.
And you can't guarantee fair use saving them. It is intentionally vague, and it just takes one bad judge's ruling to change precedent (even at the Supreme Court level).
I'm not going to argue too strenuously for any particular number, so long as your proposed number is lower than "70 years ranging upward to infinity" - don't look a fantasy gift horse in the mouth, right? - but I'll just point out that even if "A Game of Thrones" were magically out of copyright today, Martin would still be benefiting from the surge of interest. The interest would sell the sequels that were still under copyright. It would sell the sequels that have yet to be written.
It isn't even obvious that Martin himself wouldn't benefit from the additional publicity of giving his earliest books away for free, then selling the sequels. Though I doubt it in this particular case, because of the whole HBO-series angle: presumably Martin is collecting royalties on the TV show, and collected option payments even before the show was made, and if the original book was out of copyright HBO needn't have paid these fees. But the works that are in peril aren't the ones that get optioned for movies and TV: Adapted works stay in print, if only as a form of tie-in merchandise for the show.
If A Game of Thrones were out of copyright, he wouldn't be collecting royalties on the adaptations -- unless he made such an agreement while it was still under copyright.
One side effect of making copyright terms short, as is being discussed, is that studios could freely make movies (video games, etc.) based on all but the most recent works without seeking approval or paying royalties.
And if HBO's adaptation of A Game of Thrones was popular but was relatively inaccessible since most people don't have an HBO subscription, any random person could make their own adaptation of the book and sell it cheaply and widely.
I'm not convinced I understand the full implications of this enough to make a definitive statement about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's definitely something that should be considered carefully.
The problem is that the copyright clock starts ticking the moment you've fixed an expression, not from any registration or publishing date. So a creation that is largely done but is being shopped around to publishers, or sitting in a drawer collecting small tweaks and edits is losing its monopoly.
And if you erode much off 14 years, it starts to sound unnecessarily short.
Just ask any writer, comedian or musician how long their original creations were kicking around before they got anyone interested in paying them for it. Several years is common for their pre-discovery work.
Copyright was setup by the people to give incentive to create new works for the people. If you can rest on the work you did decades ago, there leaves no reason to continue with the arts†, which goes against the whole spirit of copyright in the first place.
† Assuming profit is the driving motivator, as copyright does.
I think you're putting too much emphasis on trying to maximize output from each individual creator. When, in every case I've ever heard or read of, creators already go as fast as they can (provided they can afford to live off their creations). And, further, despite those efforts very few find subsequent success.
So worrying that creators might sit by the proverbial poolside instead of creating new works seems silly to me and completely at odds with reality, even under our current copyright regime where copyright is effectively perpetual.
What I take into consideration when thinking about copyright terms, is trying to balance a reasonable time from which a creator can make a living off their work (given what we know about how creation happens), against a reasonable time before which others can try to make their living from that work.
As that is also what the public domain is about: freeing up old works for others to extend, adapt and interpret in their own attempt to make a living.
And along those lines, it's worth recognizing that there's a very real risk to the rate of 'new' creation that would come from shorter copyright terms. Should Mickey Mouse fall out of copyright, wouldn't the corporate incentive be to put Mickey Mouse into every children's work? (Particularly given the state of our risk-averse creative industries.)
The 'new' works we got might well start looking even more familiar than they do today.
> So worrying that creators might sit by the proverbial poolside instead of creating new works seems silly to me and completely at odds with reality...
It seems equally silly to worry about squeezing every ounce of profitability out of every work of art that we can think of, and for every edge case.
Artists will keep creating whether copyright is infinite or only 14 years. Maybe 22.7 years is optimal, but this is a boring discussion to have
> balance a reasonable time from which a creator can make a living off their work (given what we know about how creation happens), against a reasonable time before which others can try to make their living from that work.
Perhaps shift the perspective a little. What is reasonable time period for which others should be prevented from producing new work derived from the original? The problem I have is that copyright is at conflict with what we all know to be reality: most art is a product of our shared culture and only partly original. Copyright actually blocks the natural evolution of ideas and prevents society from benefiting from significant derived works.
Just change it to "The moment the work is displayed, published, performed, or otherwise exhibited in a public venue under authorization from the creator" or whatever the equivalent legalese is.
If copyright doesn't begin until exhibition, then the outright theft of private works is legalized. [1] You'll have reintroduced the problems that implicit copyright existing at the moment of creation was intended to solve.
So to fix that, we can then either recognize the right of the author prior to publishing/exhibition with more complicated rules, or simply extend the term a little and maintain simplicity.
[1] Joe writes a book. He shows it to Bob for notes. Bob publishes it under his own name. The copyright would belong to Bob.
There is a sane middle ground. Copyright is granted upon creation, but infringement can only be pursued in cases where theft (or strongly probably) theft can be shown. Someone you don't know has the same idea? Tough cookies, you should have published. After public unveiling (registration, publication, etc), the timer starts. This puts some onus on the creator to not spread his work around willy-nilly, but allows him to shop publishers etc.
Hopefully this will be less of a problem going forward with ebooks but the internet is full of stories of writers with several profitable books published who ended up sitting on novels for years when the horror market collapsed, good well edited books that went on to be profitable when "Urban Fantasy" started selling.
Or just a case of publishers not wanting to publish more than X books a year from a given writer, regardless of output.
Those are books of course. Movie scripts are notorious for floating around Hollywood for years, sometimes decades.
Consider things like movie rights. It's not unusual for there to be a very long time lag between print publication and the release of a movie version (e.g., Watchmen or Hitchhiker's guide).
I've always liked the idea of setting copyright to expire n years after the expiration of the copyright owner (where n is long enough to handle the "take care of my family when I die" and "don't disincentivize publishing stuff made by older people" issues). n = 20 is my arbitrary proposal.
Copyright owned by deathless entities (corporations and such) maxes out at another arbitrary number (I like 40) and there are no options for renewals in either situation.
Conditional upon every book a publisher invests in being successful, yes, this would be okay. But you need to provide enough runway for publishers to earn enough profit on their successes to offset the losses. Otherwise you're reducing the returns on being a book publisher and implicitly discouraging publishing.
To me the bigger problem is that after a short period of time any successful work would be fair game for large corporations to exploit without compensation to the creator. So they just wait it out instead of dealing with the creator.
The original motivation for renewals I believe was that orphan works and abandoned/discontinued projects would lapse, since nobody would bother to renew them.
But I find such rules create little more than traps for the lone creator or industry outsider; someone who is already at massive disadvantage in the industry. Unnecessary bits of procedure are naught but hand-outs to those who have the time to professionally game the system.
And companies [1] are highly unlikely to pass on paying a nominal fee [2] when the potential return is so high.
[1] Only companies are likely to have orphan works that are even known to exist by anyone willing to appropriate them.
[2] The fee must necessarily be nominal, lest you again disadvantage the lone creator/outsider.
20-25 years might be fine, but I still wish there were stronger fair use laws, and that people are more easily allowed to remix someone's work. Think about how much more "fan-art" could be created around more creative works, which would serve both the author by increasing the popularity of the original work through both increased awareness and loyalty from the fans, and also the public by enhancing the culture around it.
I absolutely agree. In an ideal world, Fair Use should have been codified long ago, and a more-broad 'non-commercial' qualification added.
That said, given the state of lobbyists and legislation in the US, I sometimes feel that it's better for all of us that they aren't being given a shot at re-writing (and thus inevitably eroding) those rights.
25 years seems fair.