Even if the timeline in the question is off, do you agree with the premise? If Stephen King puts out a novel in 2026, when should I be able to sell photocopies of the novel without paying royalties. 2027?

The ultimate purpose of copyright is to protect creators from the rapacious publishing industry. Now, it doesn't do a good job of it, in large part because the publishers have twisted it to mostly be a tool for publishers attacking publishers rather than creators to retain their rights.

But how much better would it be for creators if you gave those rapacious publishers the unconditional right to screw them over if they just wait 5 years (given production lead times)? You're taking away essentially the only lever creators have over some of the greediest capitalists imaginable, and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that's going to improve the lives of creators.

> Should a person have the unilateral and unlimited right to a piece of work for all eternity

Funny that you think I think this. No, I think the ideal copyright term is somewhere around 50 years. When you make it too short, you end up incentivizing publishers to screw over their creators as the copyright term will mostly be eaten up by the time it takes to produce something in the first place.

In a world of print media and books, 20 year copyright makes sense; it gives the media time to disperse through the population, saturate, have whatever impact it will on the culture, and throughout that time, the originator can profit.

In a world where distribution of a novel the size of War and Peace takes less than a one second download, there's no value beyond gatekeeping and exclusivity that publishers and platforms can provide, and those are arbitrary and artificially imposed, and entirely unnecessary.

Copyright is fundamentally a ceding of power by a society to individuals, granting them permission to claim sole ownership of their writings for a period of time, preventing other people and institutions from plagiarizing the work. We, society, cede the right to freely exchange information in deference to the creators of different media so they have the opportunity to profit from it.

The value of media is independent from the commercial activity which copyright protects. Someone attempting to claim authorship of public domain works might do it better, or maybe they make it worse.

There's no other purpose to copyright when the internet exists. We've seen nearly 4 decades of what this sort of system does; it allows those with lots of resources and lawyers to extort and exploit those without on technicalities and gotchas. It enriches and rewards middlemen assholes without concurrent return of value to society. It results in brainless reshashes and remakes and protected IP franchises into milquetoast formulaic omnislop. Any sort of actual creativity and variety gets suppressed or outcompeted or even legally squashed, even on the off chance that it might negatively impact sales. Books and films get destroyed as tax writeoffs. Artists get their music and writing and entire life work hoarded away by some massive multibillion dollar corporation, and sometimes even left to rot and fade away to dust, never to appear again.

The purpose of a system is what it does. Your idea of a copyright system has been tried, and it has failed. It's time to update to a system which works in the world which is.

The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted

One provision of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act [0] (which expired 6 months after passage of the law) allowed next-of-kin to revoke (the sale of) copyrights sold by the author without recourse (by the folks who paid for them). Allegedly, this was added by Disney in order to cut costs hundreds of millions of dollars in a dispute over licensing Winnie The Pooh IP/rights [1].

Expect something similar when the next big author dies; my prediction: JK Rowling.

Notes:

0 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/505

1- https://hughstephensblog.net/2023/12/18/winnie-the-poohs-cop...

Imagine what a better world we would live in if the Tolkien estate was able to kill D&D in the cradle as they would have liked...

/s

Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding your only motivation to create or share anything is the opportunity to extract as much value from society as possible.

If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?

But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.

Touché.

This will arouse the ire of the “copyright infringement isn’t theft” people - but we also have the government enforce shoplifting and larceny from retail businesses.

I believe the legal cost to recoup the loss of either IP revenue or physical property will be born by the victim though.

Right, that's one of the terms of the Berne Convention that I am referencing.

Taxing copyright ownership is effectively impossible.

Unless you want to figure out how to receive a tax bill for the comment you have written.

Just about any written or artistic artifact you create is subject to copyright protection. How do you begin to decide how a tweet should be taxed

I'm in the UK. Simply owning land does not incur taxes here, we don't have land value taxes. You pay capital gains tax on profits selling land. There are annual taxes on buildings such as council taxes on houses, specifically to pay for municipal services, but not generally on land.

If I make goods I'm not taxed for owning them, only if I earn income from the sale or use of those goods.

Real property is taxed, but often you do not pay capital gains on sold real property (this "often" of course varies by jurisdiction, so yes in lots of places you may pay some if the conditions are right), when selling intellectual property you often (same proviso as before, only inverted) pay capital gains.

IP is next to impossible to appraise, unlike land.

It’s pretty easy to ballpark what a lot of house or office building is worth based on comparables that sold recently. IP doesn’t sell that much and comparisons are harder.

Real property is sometimes taxed. Certain uses/users are partially exempt from taxation, and some uses/users are entirely exempt. It is not legal to rob these properties, nor should it be.

Council taxes could be considered propertie taxes, I guess, though I've always thought of them as paying for rubbish collection & etc.

However council taxes are paid by the residents of a property rather than the owner of a property. Granted these are often the same, but consider the case of a landlord with five properties the tenants would be paying those.

In the sense that Americans talk about property taxes as an annual thing I believe that distinction makes it a slightly different thing..

(And council tax is only a thing for property, if you buy a chunk of land with no houses upon it you pay nothing.)

They're not exactly proportional to the value of the property though are they? There's folks in London with multi-million pound mansions who pay the same or less in council tax than a family home in the suburbs.

Well, technically they're annual, but you're allowed to pay them in arrears over 10 or 12 months.

There is a legally protected right of publicity. You cannot take someone's likeness and use it for your advertising campaign/movie/endorsement without their permission.