I wouldn't blame the TPP, I'd blame the powers behind the TPP. This is an effort that's been going on in parallel along many fronts.

I was unaware of that. It is a shame. I had been holding out hope that the rise of pirate parties in Europe meant that there was enough of a countervailing special interest to push things back to 14+14.

Just on this a+b issue. I think the +b is the most objectionable part of the whole thing and I wish people would not propose a return to shorter terms but include that as a sop.

My reasoning is this. If I publish something, and claim copyright on it '(c) yyyy' for example. Then, after yyyy+a years it could be known by all to be copyright free, because you have the original published document in your hand which states the start date and the term is known. With the possible +b included, it becomes difficult to determine what the copyright status is because you don't know if it has been 'extended' so you really need to wait until after yyyy+a+b. With the current system of life+b then its even harder to know if a published work is out of copyright unless the author is well known, and because this suits the entrenched interests I believe that it is at least partially intentional.

If pirate parties or anybody else want to campaign for copyright reform, then my utmost wish would be that they fix this issue at the start. Lets have a fixed term please.

The problem with fixed terms is that there's really two classes of copyrighted things: junk and treasure. The opposition in this debate is obsessed with treasure. They love the rare, valuable IPs that retain relevance for decades. A scheme that still assigns long copyright terms to treasure is much easier to pass. Then at least the junk can have short copyright terms. That might seem pointless, but the fact is that there's a lot more junk than treasure in the world. And, just because the copyright holder didn't value it doesn't mean it's useless. After all, one man's junk is another man's treasure.

That's why the copyright term should be flexible. A natural way to achieve this would be to tax copyright (why not? many other properties are taxed, why not IP?) progressively over time. For example first three years zero tax, fourth year $1000 and doubling every year from that. When copyright holder is not willing to pay the tax anymore, the piece of work moves to public domain. This solves also the orphan works issue automatically. (Obviously, there are some international details to be sorted out with this idea.)

Then what about me. A lone programmer who can't afford to pay that much and takes advantage of the fact that software you write is implicitly copyrighted?

I think in my ideal system everything would get a decade or two implicitly. After that you'd need to register. I'm not sure there'd be much point in making registration expensive, either. It could probably be free.

The main principle is just that if you no longer care about something enough to do a little work to keep it, then the time has come to release the rights to that thing into the public domain. A bit of paperwork every ten years may be good enough for that.

Registration could also clarify ownership. Problems like what happened with NoLF [1] or Google Books might be less likely.

[1] http://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-c...

> A bit of paperwork every ten years may be good enough for that. Disney would then be able to keep their copyrights as long as they want. They have the money to purchase politicians, why wouldn't they be able to spend a few extra grand or so to file paperwork.

There would be a limit on the number of renewals a work could have. Though, it's true that Disney would probably renew as many times as possible for all of its major works. The fact that the reform wouldn't seriously affect their business is a compromise to help make it more politically plausible.

Rather than Europe, I imagine the biggest countervailing force going forward will be a billion-strong market of Chinese consumers who don't consider IP rights to exist, and don't really care whether the products they're purchasing are originals or bootlegs.

Once upon a time, Americans didn't care about violating European (largely British) copyright. I expect at some point, the Chinese will start moving to protect the "originality" of their near copies which will get more legitimately original over time.

Unfortunately it's really difficult to produce cultural products (films, TV, books, etc.) in China because you never know when the censors are going to shut you down -- unless what you've produced is so bland there's no way anyone could find it objectionable.

This will have to be fixed before China can start producing its own export-quality cultural products.

They will be led to believe these rights exist when there's sufficient Chinese artistic IP that people from abroad want to use.

They aren't going to push for limited copyight terms though.