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.
I’m good with going back to the original term of 14+14, as it strikes a good balance between providing incentive to create and opening older works up to the public domain.
Going back to this is where I would put it. If an artist cannot make new works after 28 years then maybe they just have to do other work. Most artists I know produce something about once a year or faster. Be it a song or a book or a painting.
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.
I’m good with going back to the original term of 14+14, as it strikes a good balance between providing incentive to create and opening older works up to the public domain.
Going back to this is where I would put it. If an artist cannot make new works after 28 years then maybe they just have to do other work. Most artists I know produce something about once a year or faster. Be it a song or a book or a painting.