What is one thing you hate about lost media hunting?
Jan 20, 2022 5:00:50 GMT
extremewreck2000 likes this
Post by theCarbonFreeze on Jan 20, 2022 5:00:50 GMT
Jan 19, 2022 20:51:19 GMT co said:
Im afraid I must disagree with you. Thats how it was for all of human history before Disney came along and we were doing just fine. But even then, fine, you can make it so the copyright lasts for the lifetime of the creator--I can at least see the logic in that. Lets just agree that Life+70 years (and who wants to bet it gets extended soon?) is completely insane.
I wonder what this means for properties such as Calvin and Hobbes? Waterson obviously doesn't want merchandising or adaptations of his comics, but when copyright expires that won't matter right?
That's what public domain means, yes. Anyone can use it, it goes into the wider culture and becomes a part of our collective heritage like Paul Bunyan, Grimm's Fairy Tales and A Christmas Carol. The tradeoff is that since anyone can use it, merchandising loses a lot of its incentive because anyone else can undercut you and make their own merchandise.
I'm not going to derail the thread arguing copyright law or give a justification for every scenario that would be "bad." But I will just say that if we abided by the will of the creators in every circumstance, we would have lost a lot of great art over the years. Virgil wanted the Aeneid to be destroyed upon his death, it wasn't thanks to the intervention of Augustus and now we have one of the greatest epic poems ever written in Latin. George Lucas wanted the original unaltered cuts of the first three Star Wars movies to be superseded permanently by his "special editions" which are objectively inferior. (Poor color correction on top of the stupid changes for one thing.) Luckily, fans took matters into their own hands and now we have Harmy's Despecialized Editions. (Which many, including myself, consider to be the definitive way to watch those films.) I don't think the will of the creator should be a permanent, binding albatross around their art, robbing us of the potential art that would come from it being PD, especially if they're long dead. I think after a certain point, art and inventions belong to the common heritage of all mankind. But that's my $0.02.