0-5 years commercial copyright - the author/creator has total say on any and all commercial use, fair use doctrine applies. Years 6-10, extended fair use: mandatory attribution and 15% royalty but otherwise unlimited for public use in any context, for any reason. Years 11+, goes to public domain.

Simple system. Encourages creativity, 99% of all money made on media (books, music, movies,etc) gets made during the first 5 years after publishing.

No grandfathered works, no lineages of families who had a creative relative back in the 40s getting to coast through life by bilking the rest of the world on their fluke of genetics.

Current copyright is a sick joke designed to enrich lawyers and wealthy IP hoarders, and screw the public out of money on a continual basis. We don't have to live like this.

Until it changes, pirate everything.

"Up to death" would provide a perverse incentive for people to kill creators in order to liberate something from copyright.

Or maybe we have never needed an exclusive economic monopoly on a creative work to encourage the creation of art? Maybe we would all be in a better world were art and culture lived in the collective commons, free for anyone in the zeitgeist to adapt and proliferate? Can we really say commercial production of culture has been truly the best for society?

I would argue that in a digital world, copyright should be inversely scalable to the size of the creator - that is, individual works by independent artists intended for exhibition rather than reproduction should receive more favorable terms than movies or games created by huge conglomerates intended for mass reproduction, licensing, and sale.

Or more simply: if you’re not selling it presently, you don’t get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights are solved, and we can all move on.

Copyright for nearly everything but software, is primarily a question of "can I reproduce this other person's creative work?". Fair use doctrine is so broad that I think it most everything else falls under most people's accepted "artists deserve to be compensated for their work" gut instinct.

If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of that action.

Just to try to understand this, do you think anyone should be able to make, say, a Harry Potter movie right now paying nothing to the author?

I don't think Taylor Swift became a billionaire on copyrights of her songs - it was because she did very successful concerts performing them.

CDs and streaming are just advertisements for the concerts.

It's always funny seeing these threads, when it's about AI these people defend copyright to the death. Then when it's about a private IP owner holding onto their IP, it's "death to copyright"

If its the term that's the issue, it's the term, not copyright itself. Which do you think it is?

It's rather incongruous that you register intellectual property for very little - and have states enforcing your rights for free - while a piece of land pays property taxes.

Almost all works make all their money in the first five years after creation.

5 years is therefore a very reasonable copyright term limit, that will benefit almost all creators and benefit - not penalise - the society that lets them have copyright in the first place, i.e. us.

Fuck the copyright cartels.