I disagree that these are reasonable - but then again, I am not a lawyer, writer, artist, or otherwise very connected with the creation of media.
As far as software releases go, I think that in the current era, copyright protections of 10 years would be more than sufficent. Pretty much, after 5 years, the computer environment around the software release has changed enough so that the software is obsolete and no more value can be extracted from it anyway. You notice that software that doesn't release new versions every couple of years pretty much withers away and dies.
For creative creations (books, music, movies), I think copyright should expire under 30 years, probably 20 years. The period of time on which you really can capitalize and monetize a particular version of a book or a movie isn't that long - just a few years. After that, returns dwindle.
With a '50 years from first publication' rule, stuff produced in the 50's would be going into public domain now. People who were around in the fifties to participate in that content being part of the culture of the time are old. Most are gone. I think that is too long - it puts too much distance between the original creation of the content, and being able to reuse it in public domain.
According to Wikipedia, the original laws in the US had 14 year terms for copyright, renewable for 14 years. That seems reasonable to me.
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Date: 2006-10-18 03:37 am (UTC)As far as software releases go, I think that in the current era, copyright protections of 10 years would be more than sufficent. Pretty much, after 5 years, the computer environment around the software release has changed enough so that the software is obsolete and no more value can be extracted from it anyway. You notice that software that doesn't release new versions every couple of years pretty much withers away and dies.
For creative creations (books, music, movies), I think copyright should expire under 30 years, probably 20 years. The period of time on which you really can capitalize and monetize a particular version of a book or a movie isn't that long - just a few years. After that, returns dwindle.
With a '50 years from first publication' rule, stuff produced in the 50's would be going into public domain now. People who were around in the fifties to participate in that content being part of the culture of the time are old. Most are gone. I think that is too long - it puts too much distance between the original creation of the content, and being able to reuse it in public domain.
According to Wikipedia, the original laws in the US had 14 year terms for copyright, renewable for 14 years. That seems reasonable to me.