AdderXYU wrote:As they should. I don't understand how copyright can expire. It's like saying that a store can be robbed from now and then so long as it's been open over a century, and you tell everyone where you got your goods.
Copyright can expire because the idea of copyright is to support the notion of benefiting the public. If you keep something private, then you needn't worry about copyright -- you aren't selling anything, and the public can't see it.
As soon as it's put out for public consumption, you are contributing to the public discourse. And you can sell your work and ensure that others do not copy your work.
The catch is that the benefit granted to you -- the limit that people can not copy your work -- goes away over time. You benefit from the copyright by limiting what the public can do, but after a time that limitation no longer exists to the benefit of everyone. Not to mention that the idea of copyright is to motivate creators to release works to the public -- by granting a perpetual copyright, you end up stifling that creativity as people treat art as a lottery ticket, rather than creative expression. Artists should benefit, but they benefit from the public. After a time, the public should benefit too.
