From a moral PoV pirating old movies isn't a big issue, especially in cases where the original makers are already dead. At that point you're only feeding Hollywood bosses, shareholders and decendants. Same as torrenting music from dead artists. I don't care for Jimi Hendrix' greedy sister or 'Authentic Brands Group', which owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music. These people can create their own art instead of living off other people's work.
but enough about anthropic
Well played.
What if Jimi Hendrix wanted for his sister to benefit from his work?
Hendrix has been dead for twice the length that copyright originally lasted, and for longer than the copyright period at the time he was alive (i.e. during his life when he was assessing the economic fairness of creating his music, he would've expected his work to already be public domain today). My daughter is older than her grandmother was when that music was written. Why would we care any more than e.g. what Francis Scott Key wanted?
A decent proxy for the maximum appropriate length of copyright might be when the next generation starts making those edits or disclaimers for changing culture (so the original is no longer considered appropriate for current markets), so at most ~20 years or so. One generation, and then it is history/heritage to pass on (or critique, as the case may be).
Who made his guitar? It seems like he made all his art on the back of someone else’s work… they should be getting royalties for every track made with their product
(I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)
I don't think that the guitar manufacturer asked for royalties.
On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)
Too bad because she isn't either way. It's all going to shareholders and top executives.
If we had a sane copyright system everything older than 10 years would be in the public domain