Big T, perhaps you’ve stated it already in the thread, and I haven’t yet seen it, but what science supports a maximum length of 14 years for copyright? Even if there have been studies on marketing and reinforcement that suggest most works achieve most of their remuneration within 14 years, I wouldn’t place that much faith in that research. Not enough to drastically curtail copyright from the term of even the Founders’ time. Although, IIRC, copyright renewal, back in the day, was fraught with difficulty: there were a lot of procedural hoops to jump through and many authors’ heirs were excluded from renewing the copyright on their relatives’ works.
Lance strongarm, considering the purpose of the limited monopoly in Article 1 Section 8 is to encourage artists to produce creative works, surely the degree of encouragement—how much money the artists make from those works—is relevant to the discussion? If “society” can get as many works from artists if the monopoly term or its scope was reduced, due to artists making “enough” money within a short period of time, shouldn’t the monopoly term be reduced? Again, it’s an artificial monopoly designed to reward creators for the time, energy and materials they used in creating their work, be it an artistic work (copyright) or a scientific discovery (patent).
Max Torque, we don’t seem to have a problem with patents expiring within the lifetime of their creator. Why should we have a problem then with the idea of copyrights expiring within their creator’s life?
It won’t be adopted—Berne and large media companies will see to that—but my own desire for copyright terms is that they be of much more limited duration, and come with a renewal period, during which all authorial rights automatically revert to the author or her heirs. This would allow for renegotiation of licenses, possibly leading to greater renumeration for the author. If the work was a work for hire, then the author would be the hiring entity. But the concept of enforced renegotiation would still apply. The monopoly’s supposed to encourage authors to keep creating, not to encourage them to create one work and stop creating. Which is my main problem with the gigantic length of current copyright terms.
In a perfect world, I’d also like to see a concept applied to patent and copyright from the trademark world: the idea that the protected work must be actively used in commerce. For patent, I’d apply that concept to mean that the protected invention must have an embodiment created and available for sale. For copyright, that the work must be still published and available for sale. A shorter term would solve many of the pesky orphan works problems, but I’d encourage development of a procedure to extinguish protection on works that aren’t available for sale. I categorically reject the idea that the artist should be allowed to take their work and use copyright to shield it from commerce. I want to see the artist get paid for their labor, but if the artist doesn’t want to be paid, then get out of the way and let someone else market it.