Sticky Copyrights Doomed?
So, I’ve been thinking about the plausibility of the idea described in the two posts below of making copyrights unassignable. That is, copyrights would stick to the author for their duration. But, if we allow all this contracting out of the actual copying on behalf of the author then it seems inevitable that all the rights normally contained in a copyright would simply be contracted out (especially by those this was intended to help, like the struggling musician trying to strike a deal with a record label) and we’d have assignment in practice if not in name. I think that’s probably a fatal flaw here and any attempt to limit the copyright holder’s contracting rights is just going to be ad hoc futility. Bummer. I suppose one could arbitrarily set a statutory time-limit on these contracts, maybe a year or five or something. This mitigates the impact of assignment under another name but still could put an artist/creator with a weak bargaining position in a tough spot. It might just be a heck of a lot simpler to make copyrights last just 14 years. Hey, didn’t someone else already think of that?
While we ponder on this, let’s read these suggestions for copyright reform.
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