1. things that are worth something (like money) don't disappear at their owners death

2. this is disingenuous. it is already the case that the massive majority of artists have a very hard time generating a sustainable revenue stream from their work, and this has always been the case. the goal of a copyright system is, amongst other things, to try to help with that.

1. The author no longer receives value for it. Per another comment, allowing the paid transfer of copyright, but limiting it to a small amount of time since creation/publication (i.e., 14 years), to allow the owner of the copyright to milk it, still provides plenty of value and incentive, while also allowing things to return to the public domain as part of our shared culture.

2. So with copyright it's super hard for artists to live off their work. How is that defending copyright? If you're claiming "Well, it'd be even worse -without- copyright!", you haven't actually made a case for that. Certainly, if we want to fix the fact artists have a hard time, perhaps an alternative monetization scheme, irrespective of copyright, is the right answer?

What if the author is a company? Like Disney.

Then they should get copyright for 14 years since publication, like in the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne. There is no benefit for society to extent copyright past that point, since it does not induce creative corporations to publish more works: profits 20, 50 years into the future are not relevant to current business decisions.

The original idea was that copyright is a compromise that maximizes the social welfare, people give-up their natural right to copy and share for a limited time so that more culture is created. Of course, once the system was set in motion, the holders of valuable works had a very strong motive to exert political pressure to extend the copyright to absurd lengths and push the notion of "intelectual property" at face value, instead of the original social compromise. No one was left to fight for the public domain and now we have these huge dynastic corporations that are strongly anticompetitive, using warchests of past works that new creators haven't yet amassed. If not for the internet and long tail consumption it enabled by lowering entry barriers, a few companies would own all comercial culture.

Even 14 years is an eternity in our fast-moving world… how about 4 years.

I disagree with the premise that the company could be an author. It's the employer of the authors, commissioning them to create something. I'd call Disney the copyright holder.

Walt Disney was an actual person and one of the founders of what became The Walt Disney Company.

Yes? Companies are made up of people and have founders who are "actual people". He also acted as an artist in various positions within his company (producer, actor, director, writer, animator). On the whole, his copyrights were owned by the company, though. He died in 1966, and that has no bearing on when copyrights owned by the Walt Disney Company will expire.

Who, specifically, is that 1928 copyright still encouraging to create new media? How does it benefit society more to have insanely-long copyright terms than it would to free up creations earlier for riffs, remixes, and so on?

My point was that copyright is not going away after the holder dies if the IP is transferred to a company.

And my point was that it shouldn't be that way.

IBM can't patent anything if none of the inventors sign on. Copyright can be the same.

This kind of rhetoric is quite tiresome, please don't.

This rhetoric might be tiresome except for the FACT that it is so devastatingly true. A significantly different copyright legal framework might be defensible but the current system is simply laws bought by the highest bidder

This kind of complaint is quite tiresome. Please don't.

Seriously, I tire of this notion that discussion must be dry and boring. Holding discussion hostage to "don't say anything that might offend, police your tone, and say everything as plainly and factually as possible"-type rules allows intellectually dishonest participants to game the system, i.e. bullshit asymmetry. Clever use of rhetoric is an effective tool for highlighting disingenuous arguments. In this age of information overload, we need it.

He's not wrong, though.

Yes, he is right of course. The "mock surprise" way of delivering a point isn't at all conductive to a discussion though.

The point I was replying to was either equally flippant, or it was incredibly naive. I am assuming someone on HN, posting about copyright, is the former, not the latter. If the person was literally so naive to believe that the only way for a creator to be paid for their work is to have the copyright system we currently have, then I apologize for my tone.