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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 7691221" data-attributes="member: 40166">Later pastiche material that the estate had had produced. That alone negates your argument. One might also discuss the use of the Conan name on three movies that look nothing like anything Robert E. Howard wrote.In the case of movies, there's an argument that copyright helps encourage production of good, authentic copies instead of third-generation copies of 8mm versions with cuts for TV. Warner Brothers DVDs of their old movies tend to be much better than Mill Creek copies, after all. But the existence of Mill Creek hasn't stopped the better works in their collections from getting good editions: e.g. Carnival of Souls and Nosferatu both have expensive high-quality editions. If the consumer wants 50 movies for $20 instead of a single version of The Ape starring Boris Karloff at the same price (better video, same lousy plot and special effects), that's capitalism at work. In the case of books, I don't believe it at all, especially not in the 21st century. Conan came back into print because fantasy became cool and popular again. Books are cheap to reproduce; if they're in the public domain, Hathitrust and Google Books can show you the exact original publication. A university or Project Gutenberg or Wikisource or some fan unaffiliated with any larger organization can transcribe that or a hardcopy in their possession and put it online trivially. There is no need for copyright to ensure that the original edition is available. There are many books out of copyright that have excellent editions, both electronic and hardcopy.And again, this is not just about Conan. I'm a big fan of American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, and have put everything I could find in the public domain online. Her poetry has been reprinted; the only plays that have been been reprinted recently have been by reprinters of public domain works. The Murder of Lidice has not been reprinted since 1942; it will be out of print for 95 years, until it enters the public domain and people like me and Google and HathiTrust and those publishers endeavor to bring it back in print. Lastly, Conan is out of copyright in the US, and has been since the publications weren't renewed in a timely manner 28 years after publication. You can read them at your pleasure at <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Robert_Ervin_Howard#Conan_the_Barbarian" target="_blank">Wikisource</a>. (The Wikimedia Foundation DMCA notice email is easily found, but I'm pretty sure short of a successful court case, they aren't coming down.) REH's works published in his lifetime are out of copyright in most of the world--Canada, China, India, Japan, etc.--and will leave copyright in the EU and Brazil at the end of the year, I believe leaving Mexico, Colombia and Côte d'Ivoire as the only places where they might be still in copyright in a year. Conan Properties has a trademark on Conan, but it's not a copyright issue in the US and most of the world.If we don't want some publisher to decided what people should get, if we can't trust private companies to properly handle it, we need to nationalize it, get it into the Government's hands. Only way to keep it safe.I love "as it was meant to be read" in connection with pulp fiction. You're talking about work quickly written to fill a hole in a magazine that was never meant to be reprinted; it would get one printing and then forever be out of print. I don't think Howard or Lovecraft had any expectation of future anthologization. Their works were not meant to be read from acid-free paper, all in a bunch by the same author; they were meant to be read occasionally mixed among the works of other authors.(In some cases, it's incredibly clear they were never meant to be anthologized. The Library Fuzz series has been anthologized for Kindle, and it turns out James Holding wrote "The Elusive Mrs. Stout" and published it in Ellery Queen in 1974, and then slightly rewrote it and sold it to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in 1976. Dame Christie has an anthology that basically uses the same start for two stories in a row.)I'm entirely happy to see the wide variety of copies of e.g. the Scarlet Pimpernel, and I know where to look for good editions. However, the copy I bought from Wal-Mart for 50 cents turns out to be just fine for most purposes. If I'm worried, I can shell out a few more bucks for Penguin or an Oxford or a Norton Critical Edition. The fact there's graphic novel editions that cut out most of the text doesn't hurt the copies I'm reading, and the people who bought them generally knew what they were buying. Again, capitalism works fine to produce cheap works for those who can best afford those and quality works for those who are willing to shell out the extra money. The public domain works that I've seen with lousy, overpriced editions are the ones where neither the estate nor anyone else feels there's enough demand to put out a better or cheaper edition.This is the exact same argument made above. See above for all the responses.</blockquote>

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