Jonathan_S wrote:cthia wrote:I think a copyright should last as long as the author has descendants if he so bequeaths.
I don't necessarily mind if an authors descendants are still receiving royalties. I do mind if they can use the copyright to forever prevent any new publication of the book, or block every attempt to adapt it or make derivative works from it.
Plus an "any descendants" rule makes determining who controls the copyright an eternal nightmare. Not so much for work that continued to be popular and stay in active publication; but any attempt to popularize a long forgotten work suffers from a nearly insurmountable difficulty in figuring out who can grant permission. Imagine someone in 500 years or so trying to figure out whether a given author who self-published on Amazon under a pen name has any descendants; and if so tracking all of them down to get their collective permission to incorporate that work in a collection of early 21st century non-traditional authors!
Might as well give up before you've started.
You're going to want to skewer me for this, but I can accept even that. Here's the thing. I'd be just as disappointed as you about all of the downsides of it that you laid out. But if you step into the shoes of the family who knows the intimate history of the characters, characters who may be patterned after famous people in the family, might have to endure their characters exploited, criminalized, lacking morals and every other thing awful. Now, apply that to a Christian family, whose family had a tradition of using the same name for new births. A name that is now synonymous with evil.
What if David's daughter's daughter's daughter's daughters had to read about an Honor that is a harlot of the galaxy and worse than Lady Young?
Would that be David's great great great granddaughters? Hating their great great great grandfather for ever having created that character, who is on Holovid doing hideous things in the future. Dominating the Holovid. Primetime. The longest running Holovid ever.