Copyright Laws and Time

The copyright presentation given by Jason Hardin was very informative and interesting. Many interesting topics were discussed, one that stood out to me was the fact that U.S. Copyright laws currently state that the terms of a copyright last the author's life plus an additional 70 years. This is very interesting because the time period for the terms of the copyright were originally much shorter when laws were first established in 1790. The additional time period is due largely to the lobbying efforts of the Disney Corporation as they pushed for additional time from the original laws as they stood to lose millions, if not billions of dollars when the copyright of Walt Disney's work expired. On one hand, it is good to ensure that the author is given responsibility for their work. This has the effect of ensuring that authors are motivated because if their work is not credited to them, then why would anybody want to create new material? But on the other hand, extensively long copyright laws are detrimental for an audience that has to pay extra money or maybe cannot even access information that they want to. All in all, current copyright laws stipulate that a copyright lasts the duration of the author's life plus 70 years. With the many important copyright expiration dates approaching, it will be interesting to see if copyright law's are extended even further.

Copyright Laws and Time by Timothy Nelin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.