On January 1, all the works published in 1930 entered the public domain, meaning their copyrights have expired and everyone can use these works without asking permission first. Of course, anytime copyrights expire, people start asking questions, like Do I still have to pay someone (no), How long does copyright last (see last January’s blog article), or Can I now write my own Nancy Drew story (maybe, let’s talk). Today we’ll cover the question, why does copyright expire at all?
The answer goes all the way back to the Constitution. The Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power to create laws to promote “the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (useful Arts = creative works like art, music and writing), by giving authors and inventors certain rights to their works. However, this provision specifically says these rights are for “limited Times,” meaning that these rights have to have an expiration date. So, patents and copyrights must expire at some point. But the Constitution does not say when these rights must expire, so why did Congress choose the deadlines they did?
At first, the duration of copyright was very limited, just a couple of decades, just like patents today. If an author wanted, they could register their copyright for a second term; the idea here was that authors could renegotiate their contracts once they had a better idea of what their copyright was worth, and copyrights with little value could get into the public domain faster. But the courts quickly ruled that authors could sign away their rights to both terms in a single contract, so this “second chance” idea was lost, and many authors lost their copyright early because they weren’t aware they had to renew.
As copyrights became increasingly valuable and made up significantly more of America’s GDP, Congress increased the duration of copyrights, so authors could make more money from their works (and pay more taxes). But even with a longer term, the two-term system continued to cause problems for everyone, as more court cases made the legal landscape trickier to navigate and caused more than one unfair outcome. Finally, Congress overhauled the system with the 1976 Copyright Act, which got rid of the two-term system and extended copyright duration to the author’s lifetime plus fifty years. The idea here was to make sure that copyright royalties would give the author income for the duration of his or her life and allow him or her to provide for his or her children too.
So far, this system has worked fairly well, but of course some entities (*cough* Disney Corporation *cough*) felt this still wasn’t long enough. These entities petitioned Congress to extend copyright duration still further, and Congress agreed and added another twenty years to the length of copyright. So now copyright lasts the life of the author plus seventy years, ensuring that an author can provide for his or her children and grandchildren (or a corporation can profit for many years to come, if you want to be cynical).
So that’s the history of copyright in a nutshell. Naturally there’s more to the story, but you can only fit so much into a blog article. If you’d like to hear more about why does copyright expire, or you want to learn about how this affects your copyright rights, please feel free to email me at kaway@kawaylaw.com.
