this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Thing is that copywrite did serve a purpose and was for like 20 years before disney got it extended to the nth degree. The idea was the authors had a chance to make money but were expected to be prolific enough to have more writings by the time 20 years was over. I would like to see with patents that once you get one you have a limited time to go to market. Maybe 10 years and if you product is ever not available for purchase (at a cost equivalent to the average cost accounted for inflation or something) you lose the patent so others can produce it. So like stop making an attachment for a product and now anyone can.
The problem with these systems is that the more they are bureaucratized and legalized, the more publishing houses and attorney's offices will ultimately dictate the flow of lending and revenue. Ideally, copywrite is as straighforward as submitting a copy of your book to the Library of Congress and getting a big "Don't plagiarize this" stamp on it, such that works can't be lifted straight from one author by another. But because there's all sorts of shades of gray - were Dan Brown and JK Rowling ripping off the core conceits of their works, or were religious murder thrillers and YA wizard high school books simply done to death by the time they went mainstream? - a lot of what constitutes plagarism really boils down to whether or not you can afford extensive litigation.
And that's before you get into the industrialization of ghostwriters that end up supporting "prolific" writers like Danielle Steele or Brian Sanderson or R.L. Stein. There's no real legal protection for staff writers, editors, and the like. The closest we've got is the WGA, and that's more exclusive to Hollywood.