(It deserves some more vulgar language than "broken", but, y'know,
that's what it is in the nicest of terms).
Mostly thanks to Disney and other large companies with ancient
properties and dead creators, litigation about copyright has taken a
dark turn, and many things that should be dedicated to the public domain
for the legacy of a work or a creator are instead locked away to be
completely forgotten. Instead of all works by a creator being open to
the world 10-20 years after their death, they're instead transferred to
other rightsholders who will hold them being a paywall for a literal
lifetime. Unless you live to roughly 150-200 years old (which may be
very well beyond the capabilities of the human body), you will never be
able to play with and profit off of a property that you enjoyed that was
created in your own lifetime. And that's terrible. Fair use is there to
help, but as shown with companies like Google or Nintendo, it often
doesn't actually hold up. Legality means nothing when you don't have the
money to fight a fiscal giant.
I actually had to fight with this issue myself during my work at the
Welty Lab, where we were digitizing Eudora Welty's works and trying to
make them available in the digital age, nearly two decades after her
death. We were very fortunate to be able to work with Eudora Welty's
niece who did actually own Eudora's copyright, and at least in spoken
word had permission to publish her works, but there were still so many
other obstacles. One, Welty's publishers; two, all the other media we
wanted to use. We were working primarily on a digitization of Powerhouse
(1941) where we were trying to add in the song references Welty made to
bring the story to life, more as media than as simply text. Of course,
despite the fact that all of the songs came out at the *latest* in 1941,
we would still have to purchase the rights to use them. Hell, we had to
purchase a license to use the font on the page, which we chose because
it was the font that was used in the first edition of A Curtain of
Green which came out in the same year. None of these things come cheap,
and while there *are* more streamlined ways to get them thanks to the
internet, the simple fact that these basic elements of pop culture and
media were hidden behind a paywall 80 years later is insane. A few
measely megabytes on a hard disk somewhere out there, potentially
hundreds of dollars and perpetual licensing fees. To this day, the
website I spent two years working on still is not public for this
reason. We've got it password protected to save our asses during
development.
When I eventually die, be it in 300 years or 300 seconds, I want all of
my work to enter the public domain in at maximum 10 years after my
death. Sure, if there's some big thing I've got published at the time
making my survivors a few more dollars to help ease their pain, fine.
Let it run its course. Then make it free. The world shouldn't have to
wait another lifetime for things that well could have come out half of
my lifetime beforehand.
Honestly, I've been thinking about this, and I think it is something
that is going to permeate its way into how I write licenses for
commercial software I might ever develop on my own. Most things I
obviously believe in releasing for free (if not open-sourcing them), but
of course I have no problem with someone trying to profit a bit on their
own creativity and hard work (and in fact believe that that's the best
way to profit period). I think a system where 10 years after the release
of X version of a piece of software, that version should automatically
be considered abandonware and enter into the public domain as freeware.
After all, it wouldn't hurt properties like Microsoft Office for people
to be able to download Office 2007 or Office 97 for free (and in fact
properties like those that are now subscription-based anyways wouldn't
be hurt in the slightest). So long as the rights holders are no longer
producing actual physical copies of the media for about the same amount
of time, it should be completely viable for people to reproduce them on their
own.
Not only would this encourage software developers to produce better
software AND more software, it would also make for a much more
productive and open community of software developers. Personally I'm
really interested in producing software for the original Macintosh, but
I'm worried about Apple cracking down on me if I decide to distribute
that software on a trimmed down system disk, even though that software
has been abandonware for decades now. I would be able to sell digital
version to allow people to simply emulate them if they'd like, but since
the original Mac ROMs are still protected by copyright and not open
sourced, I wouldn't be able to legally distribute that and would instead
tell people "sorry, you've got to find it on your own", opening them up
to potential malware and simple confusion. I am typing this on a
Macintosh SE, a computer from 1987, one whose software is still legally
dubious to obtain in the modern day. Sure, most companies don't actually
care about abandonware distribution and aren't actively trying to crack
down on it (nix Nintendo), and in fact companies like Apple very well
have shown that they are more open by having done things like open
source Darwin (the BSD base of Mac OS X and onwards), but they still
have the legal power to do so at any time they wish. Copyright laws, or
at least licenes, like the one I am proposing, would help tremendously I
think. Development & developers and consumption & consumers would be
better off with a far more open idea of copyright, and I hope that
that's a change I get to see or be a part of in the time that I am
alive.
