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Even that's kinda ridiculous. Why are we inhibiting everyone so your child can profit off something they never touched and that you finished 50 years ago? You had the rest of your damn life to figure out how to profit off it.
In the US, it's a pretty common situation to have some kind of retirement plan through your job, like a 401k, or if you're very lucky a pension. And if you die, in a lot of cases, that retirement plan gets paid to your spouse or children in some fashion. That's a big part of how people plan for their families in case something happens to them. It might help to cover funeral expenses, or settle debts, or legal expenses, or just to make sure their spouse or children can afford to live if they die.
If you're an independent artist though, you may not have that. Ideally you'd have some kind of life insurance, IRA, etc. to help fill that same role, but art is a fickle business, not everything sells well or is an instant classic, and sometimes it takes a while for something to get popular.
Let's say I write a book and get it published, and it's reasonably successful, but not exactly a bestseller. I probably got a nice little payment for selling the rights to the publisher, but I'm also expecting to have more money trickling in for at least a few years as long as it stays in print and keeps selling. And in the meantime I'll hopefully get more books published, more payments, hopefully bigger, from the publisher, and then have even more money flowing in from book sales. If I'm really lucky, maybe one or more of those books will really be a hit, if not, hopefully I'll at least have enough moderately successful books published to have a steady income from them, be able to save up some money, keep food on the table, save up for my kids' college funds, my retirement, etc. it's a long-term plan.
But instead I keel over and die. My spouse is now a single parent.
If I worked a normal job, hopefully some of those benefits are kicking in to help my spouse take care of herself, my funeral arrangements, and our kids. Survivor benefits from my pension start payment out to them or they get access to my 401k, maybe I even had some kind of life insurance through my job.
But since I didn't work a normal job, all they get is that trickle of money from my book sales.
And you want to cut even that off for them.
And then to add insult to injury, now that I'm dead and it's in the public domain, maybe my book gets turned into a movie which becomes an enormous hit and makes millions of dollars for some Hollywood studio, and my family doesn't get a penny of it.
Yes, ideally we'd have better social safety nets in place to help people out in those kinds of circumstances, but we don't, and until we do this is what we're stuck with.
My guy, what do you think the state of benefits in the US is? Most people would consider themselves lucky to get a 401k match from their employer. So in effect, the artist gets more to leave behind than most Americans.
And? Doesn't everyone deserve that kind of safety net? Should we take away people's 401ks, pensions, life insurance, etc. because other people don't have them?
I think I'd rather focus my energy on making sure that more people can make sure their families are secure if something should happen to them, not less
Just because the system is flawed doesn't mean we should implement even more flaws in the system to cover some of the old ones. If providing for retirement and a family that survives the early death of their provider are your priorities, let's work out systems to ensure everyone gets the support we can both agree should be provided. Depending on inherited IP rights and depending on an employer to contribute to retirement are both deeply flawed plans, and we'd be better off doing something like eliminating the cap on social security taxes so we can make sure everyone's retirement is covered and that survivor benefits are sufficient.
But what were talking about isn't implemented a flawed system, it's improving one that's already flawed, and the result still wouldn't be perfect but it's better than what currently exists
And it doesn't prevent passing even better laws further down the line, but I think you know that creating new more comprehensive survivor benefits that would cover everyone is a much harder sell than a comparatively small tweak to copyright laws.
And if we remove those copyright benefits before those new systems are ready, you're leaving people in the lurch without any safety net until those new systems can be created (if in fact they ever are)
Except this is something we disagree on. I do not agree that the massive extensions to copyright are anything other than deeply flawed.
"But it'd be hard to do it right, let's just bandaid it with more flaws."
I could maybe, maaaaybe, agree to a big shift with a grandfather clause. Anything already published would then get the old rules, and anything new would get the new, much less restrictive rules. I'd still rather just fix it properly, though.
It's considered intellectual property so it can be passer down to descendants.... As any normal property can be
And money is your property until it's taxed by the government. Property doesn't mean "yours forever".