Legal Question in Intellectual Property in New York

Copyright lasts as long as it does because that's the length of time that Congress believes it should last.

The reason copyright does not end when the work of authorship is no longer publicly available is because that would put the copyright term into the very unsympathetic hands of the publishing industry. Once copyright expires, the work enters the public domain and copyright cannot be reclaimed. What, then, would prevent the original publisher from binding the author in contract, then publishing the work and promptly sending the work out of print, then, a few years later, re-releasing the work in a cheap edition with no royalties attached for the author (copyright expired when the work went o/p, remember)? That way, the publisher would clean up and the author, who worked long and hard on the work of authorship, would get nothing.

Also, a best seller, which remains publicly available for a long time (think "Harry Potter"), would retain copyright basically forever while a lesser-known work might lose copyright after about five years; again, your scenario puts the term of copyright in the hands of the publishers, not of the issuing governmental agency (the Library of Congress).

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The reason is as simple as it is unsettling: Large, for-profit corporations with powerful (read money) influence in Washington and in the legislatures of other countries have succeeded in persuading lawmakers to extend the term. Originally, it was only 14 years, and one had to register the work. Today, a pre-schooler�s first finger-painting is automatically copyrighted before the ink is dry, and the term of protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. (There are other terms that may apply, depending upon the date of publication or whether the �author� was a corporation. It is a bit silly, since corporations cannot author anything � people do. But corporations get their own special term for works �made for hire� by humans. See http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm for an outline of various copyright terms.)

Considering that the original 14-year term was established at a time when it might take all of 14 years just to get copies of the work distributed throughout the country in an age of the printing press, no telephone, and no Oprah recommendations on television. A logical thinker might believe that the term should be even shorter today, when you can sell your book on Amazon and through many other outlets within hours of completion. And for literary works such as computer programs that may no longer be �supported� by the publisher only a few months after publication, it is logical to think that the public would be better served by allowing others to support, refresh and upgrade the program once the original author has abandoned it.

But logic is not Congress� strong suit. Re-election is, and that takes money � the kind of money you get more of if you lengthen copyright terms rather than shorten them.

To make matters worse, even though the Constitution provides that that copyright protection must be for �limited� times, the Supreme Court has pretty much given Congress the authority to deem �eternity minus one year� a limited time. In the last case where it considered whether Congress went too far (Eldred v. Ashcroft), the Court took a corporate view of �limited� rather than a human view. For humans, any purportedly �limited� time should, rationally, have some practical meaning for a living human being. But for most of us, what Congress considers to be a �limited� time is, in reality, an eternity. Remember that pre-schooler�s first finger painting? If the child is run over and killed by a school bus the day after it was completed, the vast majority of people alive when the work was created will expire before the copyright term of life plus 70 years will. That is, for the vast majority of people, Congress said, �limited time� means �probably all of your lifetime.�

The only way you will change this is by changing the way elections are financed, and lessening the ability of corporations to influence laws restricting the freedom of humans.

Good luck.