Posted March 28, 2024
krakataul: Main misunderstanding seems to be: you are talking about corporate owned copyright, and I am concerned about individual authors (H.C.Andersen, C. Robin, M. Twain, E. Hemingway, J.R.R. Tolkien, A. Sapkowski or Lucas Pope, Jeff Vogel...etc.) as I don't see how can you take away authors ownership during their lifetime?
A lot of 'personal' copyright stuff eventually goes to corporate. Be it works for hire law (someone pays you to do something, you own the created works) or be it a large company like Disney purchasing rights to make Marry Poppins movies (and they were denied for a loooooong time... until the author was running out of money). I've also heard some authors that want their works to go public after it's no longer in print but contractually those given rights to make said books/audio won't let them either. With the copyright they often say they split it into different parts. Who can produce the TV shows, the movies, the music, the games, the toys, the theme parks related to said properties, and on and on.
Selling temporary access to something isn't safe either as you've seen Bethesda gobble up Interplay's Fallout games and then they act like they always owned it. Then Fox who has nothing they really can do for Fantasic 4 will create utter shit movies every so often just to keep something they have no plans for rather than letting it return to marvel. (At present Disney could just hand it back as they have the fox AND the Marvel acquisitions but that's another matter)
Unless you are at the lowest denominator where you are producing your own items for your own works and selling them by hand, at some point it has to go corporate to some degree. And if if you do it as a business you might make a company, like Walt made the Walt Disney company which has more leverage as a business than as a person in order to secure loans to further the business. And the eyes of the law a Business is a legal entity, but since they can't die the copyright went from life+70 to something like 114 years. Get sued your property is a little too close to being something like they have and you have to sell your work or lose everything to the giant company.
Then you have evil EULA. Use an iPhone? There's reports of it uploading personal music and encoding it and letting you redownload a recoded (not original) works, and it being on the cloud they much like ICQ, Discord, Deviant Art and several other places that once it's on their platform, they can choose to use it whether you want to or not because it's in the EULA, just a little more obvious with D&D and WotC OGL revamp license where they could use your stuff without giving you anything for it.
krakataul: I guess you are focused on corporate copyright, in EU it lasts for 70 years after publication. In USA it is something like 95-125 years if I remember correctly. It seems little exaggerated, but then again, that's U.S. politics for you :)
Everything eventually goes through corporations, and it's once the original creators are gone that the corporations go evil. It's repeatedly the same pattern i'm seeing. An individual's created books/arts is unlikely to have that huge an impact. But you likely can't make money until you start selling off your ownership piece by piece. And if you don't read the fine print, they may slip in legalese language where hiring you or printing your work requires you to relinquish all rights to them. As such i hope Disney goes bankrupt, i hope the copyright gets shortened, and i hope that the politicians can get replaced with people who give a damn and aren't in their 80's. I hope the insanity stops, and i hope for a much better brighter future.
Post edited March 28, 2024 by rtcvb32