2 replies to this topic

[Anon Zytose]

Recently I was thinking about how a lot of laws in various place has a copyrighted piece of information enter the public domain after a certain number of years after the death of te author. If such laws existed in a society with immortal people, that would mean that works created by immortals might never enter the public domain. Unless evidence of the authorship was lost to the ages. (Of course, if information doesn't necessarily last forever, the work of art itself might be lost to the ages, too.)

Do you think that copyright laws might be rewritten in such a way that information's transition to the public domain won't depend on the deaths of their authors? For example, if they simply were to enter the public domain 120 years after they were created?

[niner]

We'd have to stop putting people's pictures on postage stamps, too. There is a law that says you have to be dead for 10 years before you get on a stamp. Although arranging for human immortality is a simple matter of a few hundred fundamental scientific breakthroughs, changing laws is still thought by most people to be impossible.

[lunarsolarpower]

If you haven't noticed already at least here in the US we already have eternal copyright. As soon as Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain the lobbyists converge on Washington DC and presto! the copyright term has been extended again. No copyrighted works have entered the public domain for over a half-century except where they were specifically released by their owners and it doesn't look likely to change any time soon.