this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Copyright is a good thing in general, but the way it's handled now is incredibly stupid.
The US had it right in 1790. 14 years by default and an additional 14 year renewal. After that it's public domain.
28 years is more than enough time to profit from a creative work before other people can use those ideas freely.
Imagine the creative landscape if every piece of art older than 1995 was free for everyone to use as they saw fit.
One of those rare cases where they got it right on the first try. There was actually a paper a while back that attempted to analyze the total economic utility of various copyright durations and found that the length of protection time that generates the maximum total wealth for a society is somewhere in the range of a flat 15 to 38 years.
It's noteworthy that patent law is 20 years to this day. It has survived with its core fairly intact, the main change being that you can no longer get a patent for bringing an invention into the country. Today that is called piracy (poor China).
I believe that is because patents simply have to work for the whole country in encouraging progress. If cultural production is stifled, well... Who cares? The elites in the copyright industry benefit, and they have an outsize influence on public discourse.