A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CLEARLY fair use, and even gets me to listen to the songs more, but they are stealing all revenue for a fair use video that took a lot of time and money to make to begin with, they are profiting from work they didn't even do. This is silly to me, I'm sure there's loads of other channels and videos out there screwed over by the record industry over 15 second samples from a song... Which should 100% be fair use and not be given to the record labels.

Issue is small streamers have no legal defense.

Edit, adding the channel I am referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos

▲ monknomo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.

	▲	reorder9695 37 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It also solves the issue of potentially not knowing when the author died, with a fixed period (the number isn't so important imo so long as it's sane), a work is out of copyright x years after the first known copy was published.
	▲	marcosdumay 18 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Either that or some exponentially increasing tax so that Disney can keep their vault. (I'm perfectly fine with them keeping it if they pay some proper taxes.)

▲ thdr 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> copyright should just die with the author

That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are.

The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)

▲ this_was_posted 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Then just make it the rule that the copyright expires after 30 years or when the author dies, whichever comes last.

▲ wiether 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

  > for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are

If you hire them, then you own the work you paid them to do, no?

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graeme 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Not in every country, and secondly if you're basing it on life of the author then that does't solve corporate copyright unless you tie it to the live of a particular employee.

You could do "life of author or X years, whichever is longer". Or include a period after death.

But you see how the complexities come in.

	▲	clort 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The complexities are the problem. I've always thought a fixed term is best. Then, you can purchase a work - it says Copyright <dddd> on it. Then, you know that after dddd+term the copyright is lapsed. You don't need to hunt down the author to see if they died. No guessing, just written on the work that you purchased. No, don't have optional extensions - that just means you have to look it up. It should say it right there on the work you purchased when the copyright expires. It is said that the vast vast majority of works don't earn anything significant after a few years in any case, meaning the only possible reason to have long copyrights is so that a very few people can get stinking rich. But those people already got rich, in the first few years.. society does not benefit from them getting richer. 20 years fixed term is my proposal.

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TeMPOraL 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Either that or if it didn't work, insurance industry would've created a product that makes it work for commissioned works. Nothing happens in isolation here.

▲ Always42 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This would create incentive to kill people

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ktm5j an hour ago | parent | next [-]

So does life insurance.. but we still have that.

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weberer an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.

	▲	AussieWog93 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So if an 86 year old writes a book they can't copyright it?
	▲	giancarlostoro 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would accept that as well, but crank it down to like 62 years since their date of birth, presumably by the time they would retire.

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inferniac an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

not really, when copyright disappears, so does the profit motive

sure, you don't have to pay royalties, but any other publisher can now publish too

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cindyllm 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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