Damek.

Copyright has been extended over and over again by Congress, and lots of our cultural heritage is locked up and owned by companies like Disney. It can also hurt musicians because music industry contracts usually give the copyrights to your work to the music companies, who ensure you only get small royalties on top of being taxed with residuals & management fees. Technology is changing that to some extent, but copyright will still be an issue. Part of the problem is that, even if copyright works for, say authors and singers, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it works for playwrights and actors. Or cartoonists. Or, most importantly, the public.

Now, some people say, “Let’s just limit copyright to the life of the artist - they should be able to reap the rewards of a creation of theirs for the entire lives.” But artists don’t have a natural right to control how their work is used after they distribute it. Copyright is a contract between creators and society, where we give them a short term monopoly on distribution to encourage them to contribute to the public domain. Setting copyright lengths to life defeats the purpose.

I think it should probably be set to around 5 to 10 years. If you haven’t made money off of your stuff by then, then you’re not likely to. The point is that copyright is not intended to benefit artists, it’s supposed to benefit society by benefiting artists.

But if you’ve created something that is desirable to people for decades after you first made it, and there continues to be people who want to buy it, why shouldn’t you be making money from it, rather than someone else? Because you live in a society that makes it possible for you to create that thing. As in incentive to make society better, you’re given a monopoly over said thing for a brief period. Then the thing should be made available to everyone in society so new, better things can be built without having to start from scratch.

Besides, you probably shouldn’t be too concerned about “someone else” making money from your work. Once copyright expires on your work, lots of someone elses can make money off it, if it’s still a profitable thing, so A) you’re ostensibly helping the economy by having the copyright expire, and B) it’s worth less in terms of profit because anyone who wants to can sell it, so it’s not as if one “enemy” is making “your money,” but rather that the wealth of your creation has moved on to everyone: The Public Domain.

And anyway, you’re still looking at it backwards. The real question is, why should everyone in the world give you a monopoly over your work, merely because you created it? The natural state of a work is the public domain, where everyone can enjoy it. And the natural state of humankind is to have freedom of speech, which copyright is an infringement on. We allow it because we generally think that giving a creator a monopoly will help society more than it harms.

You want a more detailed analysis on what should be done? OK, here, I’ll steal from a commenter at Slashdot:

First, the term should chiefly be based upon publication, which would be the release of the work to the public via distribution of copies, public performance or display, etc. At that point, you’re no longer worried about publishers sitting on works, which they are highly unlikely to do anyway, since then they face competition from other publishers for the exact same work. Remember: publishers exploit artists, but they don’t compete against them; they compete against other publishers, and support copyrights for that reason. Between creation and publication could be a span of some time, but not too much, since 1) we don’t want authors sitting on works (as copyright is meant to, among other things, promote the public interest in having works published), and 2) we don’t want works not intended to be copyrighted and published getting copyrighted later, e.g. personal letters that later become interesting to scholars, etc. (as copyright is also meant to encourage creation and publication of works that otherwise wouldn’t be created and published, and these sorts of works would have been without copyrights).

Second, the terms can vary for different kinds of works. For example, computer software terms ought to be a lot shorter than the terms for proper literary works, like novels.

Third, we want highly granular terms, so that the author has to frequently re-evidence his desire for a copyright. If an author only cares about copyright for 20 years, and there was only one 25 year term, then that term would be 5 years too long. With many short terms and a renewal process, the author could stop bothering to renew after 20 years and the copyright could end immediately (given 5 year terms renewable 4 times, but in this case only renewed 3 times). When we had renewal terms, the vast majority of works that were copyrighted to begin with were not renewed!

Fourth, we also want formalities for initial registration so that works where the author doesn’t care about copyright from the get-go become public domain works immediately. See the bit above about wanting to encourage the creation of works that otherwise wouldn’t be created, but not to encourage the creation of works that would be created anyway.

Fifth, ignore the lifetime of the creator. Fixed-year terms are far more predictable for both people investing in the copyright, for the author himself, and for third parties who are waiting for the work to hit the public domain. We can safely ignore the creator’s family, since virtually no works are profitable to begin with, much less for a long period of time. Works that could be used by the family to provide for themselves are about as rare as the author leaving behind a winning lottery ticket. If you are concerned for the author’s family, then you should not support copyright as a way of helping them, since it almost never does. Instead support things that do help them, and better still, are helpful for everyone, and not just the handful of fantastically successful creators out there: life insurance, social welfare systems, reliable investments, IRAs, etc. Authors who use those, rather than relying on copyrights, are actually helping their families. Copyrights as a means of support for survivors is criminally irresponsible.

Sixth, studies indicate that for the tiny handful of works that have any economic value deriving from copyrights to begin with, that value is highly front-loaded. For example, a movie will earn 90% of its profits from its theatrical release within a few weeks, mostly during the first weekend. When it comes out on PPV, the same thing happens. Ditto for its release to rental stores and retail. Books, CDs, etc. are all pretty similar. A handful of works have lasting value, but they’re so rare that it is foolish to create our policy around them, and granular renewal systems can help to weed the others out anyway. Other kinds of works (e.g. fine art) don’t derive value from their copyrights. A poster of a Van Gogh is cheap. A perfect counterfeit canvas of a Van Gogh is a bit pricey (for the labor and materials) but still affordable if you want one. A real Van Gogh is tremendously valuable, and not copyrighted. Many authors make money from means that have nothing to do with copyright, such as hiring out their labor, or selling bespoke copies whose provenance is not copyable even if the work itself is (e.g. the Van Gogh example). Copyright should generally not help these artists, since they don’t need it and it doesn’t encourage them.

Seventh, my own impression is that upon publication, terms of somewhere between 1-5 years, with an overall length of 25 years would be more than generous. For unpublished works, perhaps 10 years, with the unpublished time being subtracted from the time available to renew? This lets authors take some time to publish, but not too much. Of course, that’s a bit more of an honor system thing anyway, but we could tack on some harsh penalties for fraud on the Copyright Office if an author got caught lying about the dates.