Hi richard60, the problem with your assessment is you did not properly read my hypothetical; the author is dead, the author did not own the copyright, the company that did own the copyright is long out of business and the work is long out of print. To elaborate, the monetary value of existing material copies is hypothetically .60 cents. This is still piracy? and if so... from whom?

Copyright does expire. There are a great many assets that have ended up in the public domain that were created after 1923. So there is some chance that the above hypothetical is, in fact, public domain. If so, no piracy. On the other hand, it could be an "orphan work", and they are problematic because it's difficult to prove that the copyright has expired if you don't know who created a work. (Edit: I guess, in your case, you do know who owned the rights at one time. So you could, in theory, do the research and find out when the rights expired.)

Me, I believe copyright should work like patents, with a much shorter length of time before expiry. Perhaps not ten years, but twenty or so seems reasonable to me, rather than 70 years after your death (or effectively never, if a corporation owns the copyright). If you've created something but haven't managed to make enough money from it in twenty years or so, you're very unlikely to do so in another twenty. The idea that you can be quite wealthy doing very little beyond living off of the copyright of your long dead parent -- like Christopher Tolkien -- is silly to me. 

In my opinion, if copying something could not possibly affect the livelihood of its creator, it's not piracy. It might still be copyright infringement, and hence illegal, but I wouldn't see it as some sort of enormous moral evil. But then I don't see breaking the law as an automatic moral evil. Sometimes following the law is evil. However (unless we're talking about hiding Jews from the Gestapo), you generally have to wait for a couple of generations for history to confirm or repudiate such choices.

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