I was talking to a very intelligent Chinese friend of mine who was struggling to describe scenes in English. My first thought was "Gee, maybe he should memorise passages from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, since that has some of the best scene descriptions I have ever read".
No shortage of students like that. You can imagine my hopeful start at seeing Peake's name on the list at the start of this article, then my slump on discovering that that was for death+50 years countries, and Australia/US are death+70.
This stuff kills culture. I can't even propagandise great English literature to someone trying to learn English. He'll have to go with Jane Austin like every body else, and he can chuse something more modern if he's got more money than sense. Thank goodness she died 200 years ago, or I don't know what I'd do. Maybe learn how to read Chaucer.
So if you are in a death+70 country and happen to find it in a website from a death+50 country, you are not allowed to read it? The problem, I think, is redistribution. And the website already has the permission to redistribute it so it should be fair game to read it from there.
What happens if I travel to a death+50 country and buy a cheaper version there and return? Isn't it the same?
This makes me sad. We’re discussing something as simple as “do I still need to worry about copyright on books whose author has been dead for half a century”.
The mere fact that you had to quality this with statement with “I think”, and that I genuinely don’t know if I agree with your interpretation might actually be the absolute worst part of all of this.
You would still have, authors like Rudyard Kipling, Arnold Bennett, Josef Conrad, DH Lawrence, EM Forster and John Galsworthy, or many others from the early 20th century, already in the public domain,
may be even some of PG Woodhouse as well(I think he isn't much popular with Americans, as much as he is in the Commonwealth) .
In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they are not.
The first two books of Gormenghast are probably my favorite bits of writing. I am incensed that copyright law is hindering me from spreading those books with more people, and it really hurt to have my hopes raised when reading this fine article.
Also, as a technical matter, I'm only able to make recommendations from books I have actually read - Peake was perfect. Kipling didn't have the same ability to capture a scene in words, and I havn't really heard of most of the other authors you mention. Allowing that many other writers from the early 20th century were very, very good at writing, I'm only going to be reading them in large number if I am actively structuring my reading around trying to reduce the damage of copyright law.
No shortage of students like that. You can imagine my hopeful start at seeing Peake's name on the list at the start of this article, then my slump on discovering that that was for death+50 years countries, and Australia/US are death+70.
This stuff kills culture. I can't even propagandise great English literature to someone trying to learn English. He'll have to go with Jane Austin like every body else, and he can chuse something more modern if he's got more money than sense. Thank goodness she died 200 years ago, or I don't know what I'd do. Maybe learn how to read Chaucer.