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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1531677" data-attributes="member: 10201">I'm not suggesting it should be equal to the life of the creator. I'm suggesting it should be limited by the life of the creator. While it probably should be shorter (maybe noticably shorter), it definitely shouldn't be longer.As for an actual number: i have very mixed ideas. On the one hand, things have accelerated in a lot of ways, so something on the order of a decade makes perfect sense. i think when copyright was first enacted, 7yrs was really too short, because books (in particular) had a viable life considerably longer than that. But, as the functional life of IP has gotten shorter, the law has made copyright protections longer. It's almost as if the lobbyists think that they can fight the trend towards shorter and shorter relevancy periods for new works by extending copyright--as if that will somehow magically boost long-term sales.  On the other hand, clearly some works *are* still relevant a decade later, and i'm not sure that means the owner shouldn't still be benefitting from their sale. So maybe more like the 14yrs that it was for a while. I suppose the ideal would be based on market data: once per-year sales have fallen to less than, say, 1% of best-year sales, it gets, oh, i dunno, 3 more years of copyright protection. But i can't imagine successfully (and fairly) enforcing that. It might, however, encourage people to keep it on the market, at least, because if a book is out of print, it's sales [by the publisher] must, by definition, be zero, so it'd then lose copyright protection shortly after.</blockquote>

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