Breaking the bargain: copyright extensions are unfair to artists too.

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Posted by ninapaley | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | May 2009

span class='print-link'/spanpThought for the day:/p pWhen the copyright industry lobbies for extensions to already-long copyright terms, they always present it as a way of giving the artists of the past their duenbsp;mdash;nbsp;as a further protection of the moral rights that artists have in their creations./p pBut consider this: many artists of the past were forced to sign over their copyrights in order to work at all. They may have taken comfort in the fact that copyright would expire after a set time, and in knowing that people would eventually be able to share their work freely. Today, when copyright terms are continually extended, we should stop and wonder if these extensions go emagainst/em the wishes of the works' dead creators. Few artists of the 1920's or 30's had the option of saying, I want people to share my work, but they at least knew that copyrights would expire after 28 yearsnbsp;mdash;nbsp;if the terms had been left alone, that isnbsp;mdash;nbsp;and this may have made a temporary lockup more acceptable to them./p pa href=http://questioncopyright.org/breaking_the_bargain target=_blankread more/a/p