Copyright and e-books

In other posts I spoke about the chaos of copyright rules and about e-books, pirated or not, that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. In this post I am going to add a few of my ideas in this regard.

• Just now, the European Union and the United States apply the rule that copyright lasts up to 70 years after the author's death, or almost three generations. As authors often die now at quite advanced ages, that means that the rights to their books last until the fourth or fifth generation after their own. I doubt that great-great-grandchildren and their children should continue to collect royalties for what their remote ancestor did?
• It is clear that the objective of such long duration is not to benefit authors, but publishers, many of which are very powerful, dominate mass media, and use them to pressure governments to extend the duration of copyright to their benefit, up to about a century. I think this is an abuse; governments should not have given in to these pressures. In my opinion copyright should disappear, at the latest, 25 years after the death of the author.

The chaos of copyright rules

When publishers and author associations complain about the huge amount of copyright violation in piratical download of digital publications, including electronic books (e-books), they should start by trying to put a little order in the chaos of copyright laws, which has become outstanding since Internet has made easy the exchange of digital files between world-wide users. Let us consider a few examples of this chaos:

·         In the USA, every book published before 1923 is in the public domain. For those published between 1923 and 1963, the default duration was 28 years after publication, which could be extended to 95 by renewing the copyright. The latter became the copyright duration for all books between 1964 and 1977. After 1978, copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death.