My personal opinion is that copyright should be strong in a manner inversely proportional to the size of the entity that controls that copyright. There should also be an extensive amount of work put into patching circumventions of this law.

If I personally make a little cartoon cat guy and make it big but I’m still just like one person making animations by hand I should be able to keep copyright on my creation pretty much until I die.

If I’m a multi-million dollar corporation the copyright protection should fall off dramatically. Corporations can still make a big profit on things they just can’t be the sole proprietor forever.

I’m not sure what exact figures would be fair but you get the principal, smaller entity longer protection. Basically the opposite of whatever the fuck Disney is doing to the law.

The original version of the USA copyright law had it right:

United States copyright law traces its lineage back to the British Statute of Anne, which influenced the first U.S. federal copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790. The length of copyright established by the Founding Fathers was 14 years with an option to renew it once for 14 more.

After a quarter century, if it’s still relevant, then it’s part of community culture and everybody should be able to have access to it.

The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total. It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It’s only a rare few works that end up becoming “classics” and spawning “franchises” that last beyond that point. We’re sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows. There’s a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

The purpose of copyright should be to allow authors to live off their work, and the purpose of its expiration should be to allow society at large to benefit from it.

Given that, I’d favor a return to the origins of the Statute of Anne, so something like 15 years with the chance of a single extension of 15 more years. Only the original author can apply for the extension, but the rights don’t expire with their death and can be sold or inherited.

This would give people 30 years to earn money from their work, and if a business buys them they get at most 15 years to use them, without the chance of hoarding them for too long.

I guess the ideal duration could be more or less than that, but I feel a good rule of thumb is: if some work came out during my lifetime, I have a reasonable chance to see it become part of the public domain while I’m still alive (and potentially use it to make something else from it).

Copyrights should expire five years from the date of initial publication at most.

The copyright should be nontransferable and exclusively held by the original creator/creators.

The creator(s) should be the people who substantively contributed to the work. Monetary contributions are not substantive.

The rights holder should be an actual human person(s) not a corporate entity.

The copyrighted work should enter public domain immediately upon the death of the last living rights holder or upon the expiration of the copyright. Whichever happens first.

Any decision to license the work should require the unanimous consent of all living rights holders.

If a rights holder is rendered incapable of making licensing decisions under suspicious circumstances all licenses to the work are immediately voided and no new licenses can be issued.

I know that not everyone will agree with me but I’ve always believed that it’s less of a length of time and more of it being that the copyright should expire as soon as you’re no longer producing copies of, maintaining and/or selling it. I believe this because, from my prospective, if you’re no longer providing a copyrighted piece of media, then you’re clearly no longer looking to profit off of it, or at least keep it publicly available, and therefor don’t need it to be copyrighted anymore.

It started on the same level as patents: 14 years. It could be renewed once for a fee. Anything beyond was a mistake.

15 years default, with the option to apply for a 5-year extension twice. In order for an extension to be granted, the copyright holder must continue to make the work readily accessible.

In addition, I would have a clause where if a work is not being made readily accessible even in those first 15 years (delisted from digital storefronts or streaming services, software not compatible with modern platforms, or 5+ years out of print for physical media), copyright is considered to be in a weaker state where piracy for personal/noncommercial use is legal.

Zero.

Copyright system barely ever benefits the authors themselves. Instead, it is one of the forces perpetuating the dominance of large businesses, and allowing monopolies and oligopolies to proliferate.

Particularly egregious are patents in the field of technology. We essentially agree to stifle the progress in the name of profits of patent holders - profits they’ll take from us - and it is not alright.

We must keep technology in the public domain for the benefit of society, and we must work on better forms of author compensation.

It depends on the type of work. The proper length of copyright for books or films should long, about 20 to 25 years, because they remain relevant for longer. But software should be shorter, about 7 years.

The purpose of copyright is to enhance the public domain, not to create a business model. How well is 75 year old software enhancing the public domain? If any software has even entered the public domain through copyright expiration, what use is that software today? At best it’s an archeological curiosity, but more likely it’s no use at all.

For an independent artist in the US, I think their lifetime +25 years & 9 months.

It’s something they made, they created it, they deserve to profit off of it.

Why the +25 years & 9 months?

Independent artists may not have a more traditional retirement plan with a pension/401k, health benefits, etc. They work for themselves, their income can be inconsistent, sometimes their work may not become popular until years later or even after they pass away.

But that work is how they’re providing for their family, their children’s care and college funds and such, funeral expenses, help their spouses along after they pass, etc.

In the US you can usually stay on your parents healthcare up until 26, so I think it’s fair that we should allow their family to profit off that copyright for that long after their death.

If I were an artist, and immediately after getting my wife pregnant, keeled over dead, I’d want to know that I’ve left behind something that will help them along at least a bit hopefully at least until my kid is hopefully old enough to stand on their own since.

And sure, not every artist is going to be leaving behind a pregnant wife, but most people are going to have some sort of family who are going to be stuck with funeral expenses and other legal bullshit to sort out, and I think that 25ish years is a reasonable enough timeframe to keep the copyright tied up before releasing it to the public domain.

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For works created by/for a company (or owned by one if an individual creator sold it to them,) I think it can get a little murkier.

A lot of people cite the old 14 years + one 14 year extension that was the original US copyright law. And I get it, that sounds reasonable enough I guess.

But a lot of things have changed since then, companies are bigger, things like video games exist now that didn’t back then, and some things have gotten a lot more complex.

Let’s look at the MCU, just the main movies have come out over 18 years and is still going for the foreseeable future, and with spider man and Deadpool sort of tying in some of the pre-MCU movies into the shared multiverse, you can even argue that it’s 26 years at this point. Hell, Marvel and DC have been doing their thing since the 30s. New Star Trek stuff has been trickling out since the 60s. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong 45 years ago. Skyrim came out in 2011, and the next elder scrolls game is still probably years away. We just didn’t have franchises like we do now back in 1790, I think it’s fair that the laws should reflect in some way how long-lived some franchises can last now.

I think it might be fair at this point to allow a company to hold copyright on something indefinitely (please put away your torches and pitchforks) but

1. They need to renew the copyright every 5 years. If they don’t it automatically enters the public domain.
2. In order to renew it they must make that copyrighted property available to the average person. If I can’t go out and buy a copy of a specific movie, game, book, etc. then they don’t get to sit on the copyright for it.
3. After maybe 50 years (I’m flexible on that, but 50 is a nice, round number,) as long as they’ve kept up with the renewals, they still own it, and other people/companies have to pay them to use it for commercial purposes, but they no longer control it, after that point they can no longer deny anyone the right to use that media as long as they’re paid for it, and they don’t get to set the price, that becomes a fixed rate set by the government. A 50+ year old movie (or whatever) costs $X if you want to make and sell copies of it, $Y to create and sell merchandise based on it, $Z to show it in a theater, etc. and those prices will be kept reasonable.
4. Also, after 50 years, non-commercial use opens up. You can use it to your heart’s content however you want, copying it, sharing it, posting it online, whatever you want, as long as you’re not making a profit on it.

Bridging parts 4 and 5. Let’s say you wanted to post a whole movie on YouTube. If your channel isn’t monetized you’re totally in the clear, you can do that. However YouTube might still make a profit off of it being there due to ads and such. So YouTube can either

A. Not allow copyrighted material in their TOS, and must take it down when (and only when) requested by the copyright holder.
Or
B. Choose to pay the appropriate licensing fee to stream that copyrighted material, which again would be a fixed, reasonably low rate set by the government. It might be worth it to them to pay that fee because it means increased traffic to their site.

If your channel is monetized, you would have to pay that fee. Again, these fees are going to be fixed and kept fairly low. What those fees are is probably going to depend on how it’s used. Using, let’s say, a clip that’s 30 seconds or less of something in another video might be a one time fee of $5, but if you’re posting the whole movie, maybe that deserves some percentage of what you earn from those views unless YouTube decides to pay for the streaming license for that movie (if you then owe anything to YouTube for that and how much would be part of whatever monetization agreement you have with YouTube)

Deciding exactly what those licensing fees for 50+ year old media should be is well outside of my pay-grade.

EDIT: There’s a lot more to intellectual property than just copyright, trademarks, patents, etc. so this is really only scraping the surface, but hopefully this kind of shows where my head is at with these kinds of matters.

My first gut reaction is to say “zero. Not a god damned single solitary second. If you want to own a story or a song or whatever, keep it the fuck in your head you fucking moron what the fuck is wrong with you?”

And my only hesitation to say that is: copyleft isn’t so easy to accomplish without copyright. Particularly, without copyright, the way the GPL does the whole “source code provision” thing falls apart. Without said provision, OpenWRT wouldn’t exist. And for the existence of the source code provision, with a little luck we’ll have FOSS OS distributions for smart TVs sometime in the foreseeable future. And hopefully that same court case will spawn a proliferation of other “OpenWRT but for <kind of consumer smart device>” projects. That actually work.

It might not actually be impossible to do a “source code provision” without copyright. It’d probably involve some kind of NDA with “source code provision” kind of conditions, though. And if you allow for NDAs on stuff in place of copyright and every game or book you buy forces you to agree to an NDA… is that actually better than copyright? It’s probably worse.

So, I think even given all the above, my answer is still “zero”. But aside from that, I also hold the opinion that we should have legislation which makes for a “source code provision” on “all software” (for some definitions of “all”. In practice I could see it being difficult for companies to comply with that with regard to software made well before the law was passed, for instance. For instance software for which the source code is now lost.)

Beyond that, I’ll say that I believe in a right to attribution, which feels a little more like a trademark-y kind of thing than copyright. Rather than artificial scarcity, let’s “promote the progress of… useful arts” (quote from the U.S. Constitution) by helping creators cash in on their reputations. That plus physical products (collectors editions, swag, etc), unique experiences (live shows, theme parks, etc), authenticity (if you get it from the creator, you know you’re getting the real canon and not someone’s fanfic), quality… that sort of thing. Don’t believe the big-copyright industries when they say they’ll go out of business without the outdated and ruthlessly abused model of promoting culture that is copyright. They’ll largely have to pivot into business models that don’t depend on government-granted monopolies. But that’s a good thing.

Plus, consider your favorite individual creators. Most of them don’t make money really on what they do at all. And for the ones that do, would you really put less money toward their creative efforts if copyright didn’t exist than you do now? I support my favorite small creator on Patreon. (Don’t get me wrong. I’m concerned about the chokepoint that Patreon has at the moment, but I like the “patron” model for supporting artists better than copyright.)

Anyway. Go watch “Steal This Film” or “Good Copy Bad Copy” or something.

If I wrote a book about Bean Man the super hero, than I should maintain all rights to the concept of Bean Man and the related “characters/world” until I die or put it under public domain. The rights can be inherited by 1 generation, but they have 10 years to do something relevant with it or it falls into public domain. Also if the IP sits unused for 20 years, clear derivatives can be made so long as it’s clear the original creator was not involved.

However, the actual product, the books I write fall into a different category. After 30 years or, 1 year unavailable to legally purchase by an average person*, the books become free to share under a creative common license that does not allow for derivatives, or profit. In other words, the book it self becomes free for everyone but someone can’t take the IP and make a new “Bean Man” story (unless the copyright is no longer in effect).

* if I try some shit like sell it cash only on the 31st of February or charge a absurd price, all of my past and future works will be put into public domain as a “fuck you for being piece of shit”.

I could also see longer terms for individuals over corporations: ie. copyright protecting the creator/artist rather than the publisher

fair

18 to 21 years: the time a person born today when I register the work, will have to wait until becoming an adult member of society who ought to be able to work for society and thus be able to consume my creation on their own terms, not constrained by a “mandate” or a “license”.