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Originally Posted by fmltube
Actually yes it is fair just like a company that is granted a patent that did not make any money during that 14 year period. If an artist's product is any good, they will get sales much like porn even in a bad economy. Some niches are doing good sales wise. You do realize that by having a death +70 years only forces people to have to always pay for content. If the 14 year copyright were in effect, I could merely wait 14 years to see a movie for free just like those that prefer to wait for a movie to come out on network television.
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To me there is a difference between art and a product. I see a song or a movie or a book as a different thing than say, a computer or a TV or a garage door opener.
The one thing you are way off on is that if a artist's product is any good they will do well with it. You yourself spoke about how many terrible movies are being put out each year. These movies don't keep getting made if they aren't making money so clearly something doesn't have to be good to be successful, it can just be marketed well. There are a lot of very good movies made every year that never do well because the market is crowded and they don't get a good shot at finding an audience. There are many bands that don't make much money from their music but are very good. They don't have the sound of the moment or the right look so they don't get the big money put behind them. They are good, but they don't hit it big and it has nothing to do with their talent level. There are musicians right now who are scuffling in clubs writing great songs and they are playing in front of 30 people a night while Britney Spears is lip syncing in front of 25,000. Talent and a good song or movie really has a lot less to do with how successful you are than many other factors.
To me 14 years is just too short. If writing songs is your career shouldn't your copyright at least last as long as your career? IF you scuffled as a musician for 10 years then decided it wasn't working out and got a regular job then 10 years later someone records your song and hits big with it, is it such a terrible thing for you finally get some kind of pay off for the hard work you put in during that 10 years?
Also how would having the 14 year copyright stop the influx of garbage? You site Disney as always re-releasing the same stuff. You think that will change? It will just get worse. Now we have the Little Mermaid in 10 different versions, but if they lost the copyright we would still have those versions then other companies would come along and put out the Little Mermaid Christmas and another company would do Little Mermaid Hanukkah then a third company does Little Mermaid Thanksgiving and so on. Everyone with any idea could flood the market with Little Mermaid stuff. If you thought finding good movies was hard now, just wait until the market has everything that was released this year in it and everything that is now out of copyright repacked and sold again.