What does stretched mean?

This blog strives to be informative, if nothing else. I know we aren't getting taught about copyright laws in schools, so I try to keep things defined and explained here.

Anytime I use the say copyright got stretched, I'm putting a link to this page explaining it.  This is the copyright duration of a work that lapsed, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, presented in chart form


What you are seeing is how long the work's copyright lasted.  Even if the law changed in the middle of a copyright term...


...it meant the work was still supposed to lapse in the law of it's own day The constitution says that copyright would be set for limited times, and that was usually taken pretty seriously. It mean anything that stretched copyright  was potentially violating the constitution.

But after much legal bribery from the entertainment industry and what I can only assume is olympic level mental gymnastics,in 1975 congress decided that maybe they COULD change copyright durations and carry along with it every single copyrighted work in existence.

Some like to cite the Berne convention and alligning American copyright with the copyright of other countries. But that doesn't have anything with "fostering the useful arts", the specific reason congress is granted the power to create copyright for.

So now, that work that going to lapse in 1980 was now going to lapse in 2000. It was stretched, basically against the constitution, and in the majority of cases not in defense of authors willing and present.

But nothing lasts forever, and they added an aditional 20 years to works in the mid 90s. Now it looks like this.

So when I say "stretched", it is shorthand for "anticonstitutionally lengthened beyond the span of human life, at the behest of corporate interests for no good reason and without requiring the consent of anyone." So everybody's clear what we're dealing with here, okay?

WHen these works were made between 1923 and 1975 and copyrighted, they were copyrighted under a deal: You make the works, enjoy exclusivity for a time, and then it goes to the public. Renegging on their part of the deal, and not only doing it so, but making sure EVERYONE who isn't alive to agree or disagree with it also get their copyrights lengthened, is nothing short of thievery. It is robing US of our rightful inheritance.

But then again, maybe you disagree, yes? Let me know if I got anything wrong below! Also, let me know if there's hundreds of authors whose works didn't become profitable until 80 years after they  made them!