I need a cover pic for a car enthusiast magazine. Hey Monkeyleg, that crappy old Jaguar is obsolete and you've probably already made your money off of that pic so I think I'll use your pic. I know I could take as good a pic with my point and shoot but hey yours is already out there and you won't mind right? I asked some jerk that calls himself a professional and he wanted $4000 for one stinking cover photo. Like he thought up the film camera or something!
In a serious vein, that is probably one of the finest pieces of car photography I've ever seen. I don't know that life +70 is unreasonable. Maybe life + 20-50 if you wanted to shorten it. Maybe. Check Jill Faulkner Summers. Nobody really bought her old man's stuff while he was alive. She is not really living high on the hog. I know she did not produce the work, but she certainly had a bigger investment in it than say some Chinese book printer. My wife published a small book of poetry when she was 16. She is not known yet as a fiction or literary writer and of course no one buys unknown books of poetry. So when she gets her big break in the next two decades should an unrelated 3rd party be able to cash in on her name recognition and re-print that book? That's how a 14 year copyright would go down. Maybe we wait for one of those overnight music stars, you know the ones that wrote songs for 25 years before we heard them on the radio. Lets go find their obscure stuff from 2 decades ago and sell it because surely they made money on it by now right?
Here's a byproduct of too short protections. And I'm sure Pharmacology will hop in to correct me. Drug patents are ridiculously short. They are for 20 years but are applied for prior to clinical trials. So, a company spends ten years of FDA fiery hoop jumping and 800 million to get a drug to market. They now have 10 years to recover their investment, cost of promotion, actual cost of production and distribution, and some of that evil capitalist profit. And poof, drugs cost $3 a pill. Then you throw in the fact that due to worldwide socialist medicine that they aren't exactly pulling down huge profits in many parts of the world.
So yay, cheap generic drugs. The copying thief did no R&D, took no shots from the government over product safety, didn't even have to pay to get the word out about this wonder drug, but boy can they sell it. Quick, let's lobby Congress to dilute packaging laws so we don't have to label for country of origin. And you know the sad part? Due to what I think is too much gov't regulation, too many malpractice land sharks, and a short patent I end up often buying generic OTC because I'm broke. I know it's wrong, but I do it.