"Thanatos" <atropos@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:atropos-A57B34.17572531032008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In article <9gf2v3d0d977rrlt7pds06ov811nr9j3gb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> William George Ferguson <wmgfrgsn@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> Siegel and Shuster sold all rights forever and ever amen.
>> Congress, since then (1976 to be precise), passed a law that
>> specifically allows heirs in certain cir***stances to recover
>> copyrights which had been transferred during the original
>> holder's life.
>
> One of the worst laws ever. If the creator of a property sells it,
> there's no reason in the world his descendants should be able to come
> along decades later and **** everything up this way and take it all
> back-- as if they had anything to do with creating the property in the
> first place.
>
>> Under the law as I understand it (and AINAL and all that),
>> Siegel couldn't call a mulligan. His heirs could, however,
>> end the arrangement he had agreed to.
>
> And this is why it's an idiotic law. Why should some distant heir have a
> greater right to the property than the original creator himself?
I don't think WGF is correct that Siegel wouldn't have been able
to do it himself, but in any case the principle here gets back to what
Siegel sold at the time, and what the buyer was buying. They were
NOT selling/buying rights in perpetuity, but only for the 28 or 56
years that copyright extended. Along comes Congress extending
that to 75 years and then 95 years, which is obscene in its own
right but infinitely more so when it's a complete freebie that gets
the big company additional billions while original creators or their
heirs don't share in a dime.
As for "**** everything up" that's exactly what Warners has been
doing. They're probably the best example ever of why extended
copyright monopoly is ludicrous policy. There needs to be much
more competition, much earlier, with original authors or their heirs
getting a royalty for perhaps the 95 years.
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