Maintaining copyright should require a duty to distribute. If you do not distribute (at a reasonable price, no tricks allowed) your work, the copyright should just expire because you clearly aren't making any more money.
Creating copyrightable intellectual property is an investment, where you spend many hours doing work for free in the hopes that it'll pay off in the long term. What you are saying is "too bad, you have to do a bunch of work for free, then continue doing a bunch of work indefinitely into the future, otherwise we'll steal your investment."
Nobody would say that your stock purchases should expire if you're not actively meeting with a financial advisor or following the market. "Finders keepers, you weren't using your copyright" is just a recipe for artists to get robbed by lawyers.
I kind of like the idea of allowing verbatim redistribution if the author or their estate is demonstrably not planning to make money off it, but attribution and integrity of the work should be preserved.
Moral rights should be preserved indefinitely, yes.
Big IP holders make a large effort to mix both of those so they argue in bad faith that their profit advances human culture. Do not fall for it, they are very different things, and if somebody proposes extra protection for moral rights, only those big IP holders will be against it.
Distinguishing work for hire vs personal work would help, as well. Most commercial copyrighted works are created using a work-for-hire model (similar to textbooks). This isn’t what copyright was meant to protect.
This is 100% wrong, the very first copyright law specifically included editors and publishing houses as entities who could hold copyrights for work done by employees or contributors. Many reference books / etc were done by teams of professionals and their employers owned the resulting work.
You are appealing to people's ignorance (including your own) by evoking an idyllic past that doesn't actually exist. The copyright problems between individual authors are substantively indistinguishable and the law correctly acknowledges this. The only difference is completely insubstantial: irrational emotional appeal.
While I’m not terribly familiar with the Statute of Anne, the Wikipedia entry clearly states it was the first copyright law to be regulated by the public and granted copyright to authors which could then transfer that right to a publisher.
“It also marked the first time that copyright had been vested primarily in the author, rather than the publisher, and also the first time that the injurious treatment of authors by publishers was recognized; regardless of what authors signed away, the second 14-year term of copyright would automatically return to them.”
Your source, as best I can tell, has nothing to do with work for hire or collaborative works.
While trying to find more information, I came across this article from Cornell[0] that suggests the idea that an employer would own the work of its employees was a novel concept that originated in the late 1800s and was codified in 1909. That’s long after the Statute of Anne and early US copyright laws.
While your idea is certainly not one I’m familiar with, you seem relatively confident in it. Is there something I’m missing?
I don't like that idea at all - why should an author be obligated to do ongoing work in marketing / publisher schmoozing / etc to keep their copyright? If someone wants to republish an out-of-print novel that's still in copyright, they should at least have to pay royalties - perhaps it's acceptable if the author can't refuse a reprinting, but they definitely need to get paid. Otherwise small authors would have their IP stolen out from under them by publishers with teams of lawyers: sole proprietors don't have the resources to keep older copyrights "alive."
Not to keep all of their copyright, just their commercial rights. I say if the thing has been out of print for say, 15 years, verbatim distribution should be allowed.
Copyright itself only lasted about 15 years originally, which is a reasonable amount of time to commercialise a work. If you haven't done anything commercial with it in 15 years, it seems reasonable to me to allow the public to enjoy the work.
Honestly I think the right to remix and derivative work would benefit everyone a lot more. Never going to happen, but I think society losing a lot due to how hard it's to profit from adding your own work to someone else's work.
