this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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As a photographer, the idea of the copyright system being thrown away is horrifying to me. I've already seen my work appear on book covers and all over the internet with zero compensation for my time, energy, skills, or the money I spent making the images. This stuff happening is already morally shrugged off by society, God knows how bad it would be if it was also legal.
Does the idea of shortening it to 10 years as others in the thread have suggested scare you as well?
Not OP, not a photographer, but an author. For me, yes. You're basically proposing a system where no matter how popular my work becomes, I will never make a penny on it again after 10 years. Now, I guess if that only applies to the specific books, maybe it's not so nail-bitingly bad, but if it applies to the characters I create (as I suspect it would), then it doesn't matter if I'm still writing a series about Character A 10 years from now, I lose exclusivity on Character A and am now competing with BigMegaPub's stable of ghost-writers who are churning out a book a month about my own character.
Fanfiction isn't the problem. I fucking love fanfiction. Every time I see a fanfic about my world/setting/characters, I'm fucking thrilled. Only assholes like Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery get upset about their babies ending up on an AO3 clone in some improbable, poorly written slashfic. I'm not worried about that at all. I'm worried about Penguin and Random House, who would very quickly crush the fuck out of me without copyright protections.
Thanks, that adds a lot of good context! That concern seems less relevant to photography, since there (to my understanding) there isn't usually something copyrightable analogous to an ongoing world/character, but is definitely relevant to the conversation. How long do you think copyright should last? Would term renewals upon addition to a canon make a difference to your opinions? Do you not think your audience would care about whether additions are by the original author?
I do agree that the current time frame, which may as well be infinite, is dumb. I wouldn't even be too terribly worried about a 10-15 year copyright on a specific, individual work; Book 1 of Character A's Sexy Odyssey going public domain after a decade doesn't sound like a huge loss, and it's a good incentive to keep writing, but I do kind of rankle at the idea that some big rich fuck is going to get even richer off selling knockoff hardbacks of something I wrote. But as long as it was just Book 1, not Character A, or Sexy Odyssey World, or any of the component parts I'm still working with for Book 8 and 9. I'd like to keep those, ideally, until I'm dead and buried, but I'd compromise to something like 10 years after the last thing I write about them. I can see the value in that. If I've dropped the series in favor of The Super-Sexy Adventures of Character B, fans should be allowed to pick up Character A if they feel they can add more to the story.
Really, though, I'm so much less worried about, like, you, or Brandon Sanderson, or PurplePonyPrincessX69@AO3 than I am about the big boys. That's the part of this discussion that is always overlooked. We see how it hurts the individual fans in a variety of ways (GRRM saying "Nobody will finish the story if I die first" is a big middle finger to everyone who supported him, for example), but we don't see how the big publishing companies would absolutely demolish individual authors if we weren't protected by copyright. Fuck, they already try to wreck us all the time; just talk to the visual artists and graphic designers, I'm sure they have thousands of examples.
As soon as the copyright ends on Character A's Sexy Odyssey, if it had high enough sales and high enough visibility and some bean counter at Tor decided it was a good bet, they will straight steal it and wring every penny out of it they can. Even just with reprints I get nothing for.
As for the characters, you asked if audiences would care that it wasn't me writing; they might, or they might not, but either way, I'm now competing against myself, my readers could easily get confused about which books were "official" canon and which were alternate universes, and I have no doubt that "Jake P. Ghostwriter"'s name would be itty bitty on the cover, underneath a gigantic "based on the work of VOX AD ACTA!" written in such a way as to be deceptive as possible. On the more extreme end, they could end up Pepe'ing my Character A, and I have to spend the rest of my life on Mastadon being like "No, Character A is not a bigot, no Character A never denied the Holocaust, no, Character A would never do a hate crime, none of those were written by me, yes, I know it was heavily marketed, no, the movie tie-in is not official, I swear I had nothing to do with Character A's big rant about the Great Replacement in the trailers..."
It's not about the fans, and it's not about the little guy. It's about the robber barons with a dragon's hoard worth of cash to throw at shoving me out of my own work in favor of whatever they want to do with it. I will get drowned out very quickly.