From the Project Gutenberg Volunteers Discussion Board:
G9443 says: “Even speaking as a writer, guarding my copyrights fiercely because I think that if the publisher and the illustrator are still making money from my creation I also should make money from it, I think life +95 is absurd. Life +25 should be quite adequate for anybody. There are many people in this community who consider even that to be absurd.”
HMcG responds: “The people who really benefit from copyrights are the publishers. Longer copyrights mean longer periods without competition from low-cost public domain publishers. It’s perhaps unfortunate that at the governmental level, the people most represented (publishers) are the people who least need to be represented. If governments are given the choice to please high-powered corporations with minimal complaint from the electorate, they’ll go right ahead and do it.
“The sad part of it is, governments are increasing copyrights against the advice of their copyright offices, without considering the choices which will have the best impact on their country (which government has seriously taken advice on the “optimal” length of copyright?). These decisions are adversely affecting consumers every day but they’re hurried through because nobody cares.”
Followed by an insightful analysis from RS: “The sad truth is that when approached from an economic point of view, the optimal length is so short that it seems absurd, and nobody takes you seriously after they hear the result. Here’s the analysis:
“Let’s say that we have a work of enduring reputation, so that the right to publish it is worth a perpetuity of some annual income A. The copyright then has a present value of A/r, where r is the interest rate. We wish to transfer the copyright from the rights holder to the public when the public has paid the rights holder A/r.
“The public pays the rights holder A per year, and if this money accrues interest at the same rate r, then (omitting a pile of algebra), then the public will have paid the rights holder A/r after N years, where N=log(2)/log(1+r). Those with some accounting knowledge will recognize that the optimal copyright term at some interest rate is the same time as the doubling time of money at that interest rate:
“interest copyright
rate term
2% 35.0 yr
3% 23.4 yr
4% 17.7 yr
5% 14.2 yr
6% 11.9 yr
7% 10.2 yr
“It’s interesting to note that the copyright term of the legislation that started the Anglo-American copyright tradition, the 1710 Statue of Anne, hit this range on the nose with a 14 year term (5% interest). It got the number from the 1624 Statute of Monopolies, which limited royal monopolies to 14 years. In patent law, where the economic disadvantages of too long a patent term are quite clear, most patent offices have kept patent terms in the 14-20 year range, which seems reasonable, looking at the table above. In copyright law, the Continental jurists won the day, and things have gotten out of hand ever since.”
JH shot back: “I think you can still make a good economical case for a copyright lasting in the order of 28 years, but that will require some more math, and statistics about sales patterns of common copyrighted works. That’s why I wanted to throw in the VAT, or even some arbitrary valuation of elements borrowed from the public domain, so that we can claim a work for the public when the author has earned roughly 85 % of its value according to very conservative estimates.”
