Look. The deal with copyright is that only the creator has the right to authorize copying. If the creator wishes to give away or sell that authority that's his/her option. But as long as the creator has that right, using the created work without permission (and if desired by the creator) payment, is theft.
<SNIP>
If all creators had full time jobs creating (with health insurance and IRAs and retirement plans and paid vacation and sick days) and most didn't need to make a living from their creations, we'd all be footnoting.
Instead we spend bandwidth and time trying to figure out that Disney is a bogeyman for forcing us to ask.
Come on now. Get real.
Hi Emily and all,
Put aside the question of the overall merits of copyright for a moment. It is fair, I think, to see Disney as a stand in for all the large
Intellectual Property holders which manage to lobby the US Congress so
that the expiry date on copyright is a moving wall sufficient to ensure
that nothing ever lapses into the public domain.
The original copyright terms were, IIRC, 20 years. Perhaps with modern publishing and distribution practises and increased lifespans that's not enough. But current practise has it too long, and, if history repeats, it will get longer still.
I would say that an artist doesn't need to have well-compensated grand-children to count as well compensated themselves ;-)
Best,
Brian vdB
