Comment by dredmorbius
14 days ago
Two years might be too short.
The overwhelming majority of works have an effective commercial life of less than ten years.
Present-value analysis further reduces the individual benefit of long-lived copyright. That is warrented in only a minuscule fraction of all works.
(There are roughly 1 million books published in English annually, of which ... ten make the top-ten best-seller list. The situation gets worse if we consider this a conservative estimate, or include all other copyrighted works created in a year ... every one of the billion or so items posted to social media accounts on a near-daily basis is protected by copyright. Few if any of those have any real commercial value. The fraction of works fostered vs. works encumbered by copyright is parlous small.)
Honestly, I think we just need fo go back to life+75 or something that covers the next generation.
Copyright is a fairly basic protection on Work, and wanting to alter it to be based on percived value is catastrophic- On one end you'll deny copyright to security camera footage- nevermind it's of a meteorite and everybody is clamoring for a copy. Then, on the other hand you'll have micky mouse where it's such a big thing and Walt put so much effort into it that the copyright is perpetual. It'll tie up the courts, and give the Have's the power to remove the copyright or SLAPP the rightsholder into poverty.
We need patent reform far more than any complaint against Copyright that I've seen- and far too many people conflate the two. Lets not even talk about trademarks.