EndlessWaves: Yeah, copyright is too long and needs to be reduced to 40 years or so. Go and lobby your MP or corresponding political representative.
Breja: I don't think I agree with that. For one thing, I don't think a dozen different versions of Star Trek flying around would do much good for the franchise. For another, if I created something, a popular franchise or character, I would not like seeing it taken from me in my old age and given freely to every schmuck who wants to leech of my work.
But if you're not doing any work - i.e. if it's been 40 years since you wrote the song or whatever - should you earn money from it? People typically stop working and earning money in their old age, it's called retirement, so that's not really that different.
There's also other reasons to have a more sensible copyright length than we do now.
The whole point of copyright is to provide a
limited monopoly as incentive for inventors, and then the creation becomes the property of the public so that the general culture is enriched. Under our current laws, we've lost access to most of the cultural production of the 20th century. It's under copyright so we can't freely reproduce it, but it's not commercially viable enough to be worth reprinting. The end result is that most of it is not available anywhere. That's a ton of our cultural heritage that's been wiped out, a result diametrically opposed to the reason behind copyright.
Also, our current copyright laws are basically 100% due to corruption. Copyright used to expire at 28 years for a very long time, until Disney realized that it was in danger of losing the Mickey Mouse copyright. They bought out as many legislatures as they could and got extensions passed. They do this every time Mickey Mouse comes up for expiration. It's a travesty of how the legislative process is supposed to work.
Breja: I don't think I agree with that. For one thing, I don't think a dozen different versions of Star Trek flying around would do much good for the franchise. For another, if I created something, a popular franchise or character, I would not like seeing it taken from me in my old age and given freely to every schmuck who wants to leech of my work.
thomq: Er… Do you get to the local libraries much? And used-book stores? There are so many books set in the Star Trek universe over the past few decades that I find it hard to believe that distortion and contradictions haven't happened already.
+1
Not to mention fanfiction and daydreams. Also the contradictions between the different movies and TV series.
People typically understand the difference between offshoots of fictional universes. It happens in all big franchises and isn't really a problem. Just take a look at comics - if people were typically put off by wacky offshoot universes, comics would have died off completely with the 3rd time travel or cloning plot.