The greatest works of past times are "shitty fan works". In the eras before copyright, people were taking each other's works all the time, and improving upon it.

LoL came from DOTA, which came from Warcraft (which also deviated into MMOs, a copy of Everquest), which came from them making a warhammer game and reusing assets. It never stopped.

Reminder that Dante's Inferno was shitty fan fiction.

Shitty in that there was literal shit, but I get your point.

Is there some story about it?

Yeah, copyright pirates are all sent to the 10th circle of Hell, where they are forced to write CC licensed fanfic stories on GPL software like GNU/Linux for eternity.

Hail Stalman!

Disney has plenty of derivative dribble. One might even argue they've had to buy other creators to escape their old strategy of rehashing pre-copyright fairytales.

People will create even if the long tail of profit is cut short.

It's "drivel". But you're totally right.

Brilliant as JRR Tolkien was, I don't think he had the ability to see into the future of copyright law.

Therefore I believe that his motivation lay elsewhere.

...Which explains why there was no great art made before 1998, right?

Are they expecting to live 100 years from the point of writing? Till death of the author seems most sensible.

> Are they expecting to live 100 years from the point of writing? Till death of the author seems most sensible.

Not really; a fixed term is more sensible than life of author; why should we want to take active steps to remove the incentive to/reward for creation for creators without a long current life expectancy?

I remain convinced that a reasonable fixed “free” term that can be extended with slowly escalating annual ad valorem taxation on a declared value that also serves as an offer price for purchase into the public domain is the ideal solution here.

Having anything to do with the death of the creator is madness I think - makes it hard to keep track of it, and is quite arbitrary. It also doesn't make sense for anything released by a company (films etc.) so you have all these pointlessly different spans.

I think the very maximum reasonable copyright term is 50 years from the date of first publication/release. Simple.

What about the creator who has a wife and family and passes away a day after publication in an accident?

Sure, that example is a bit constructed and imo the death+50 years or 100 years are way too long, but I see value a) in the fact that artists need some time to finance their work and b) that some degree of inheritance is good.

That is no different from somebody who has a regular job or starts a business and passes away too soon. There is no security for the family either. In the end the main beneficiaries are big corporations and not creators.

The difference to a salaried worker is that the salaried worker gets the money for the work they do more or less immediately. The artist typically gets the payment only long after completing the work.

(Self employed are in a complicated way in between)

> The artist typically gets the payment only long after completing the work.

Not that long; IIRC, the vast majority of the money made for most artistic works is received within the first decade after creation; the share of artistic works returning much after that compared to before is small.

Sure, the works you’ve heard of are often exceptions to this, but that's because you are vastly more likely to be aware of things way out in the successful tail end of the distribution.

I would even assume less than a decade. A music piece gets attention on release, but only few are remembered a year later. Many books sell the first edition and aren't reprinted.

While for some it is the long tail which makes it viable.

I think that's why the post said "starts a business and passes away"; they have stopped being salaried and rely on the good prospects of the ownership of an own business to do well (from salaried, to "stock" owner of something that still has very little financial value or that the financial value that it has depends on the founder still being alive).

Why should a 70 year old's same work product be worth much less than a 20 year old's? It should just be a period of time, with possibly exponentially increasing renewal fees so funds go into the common good the more the public domain is deprived.

Because you can't take your work with you when you die, so it can't matter what happens to it and should be considered common good afterwards. I'd say it's actually worth more, to humanity as a whole.

> so it can't matter what happens to it

Even ignoring inheritance this is wrong, because you can sell it to someone who might outlive you, and spend the proceeds while you're still alive. The amount you can sell it for is going to be much less if there is substantial risk that the property goes away soon after the sale.

Think about this in the scenerio of e.g. a publishing advance. Just means older people will get paid less, publishers will dedicate less to marketing their work, etc.

This actually makes a lot of sense. If Disney was volunteering to pay hundreds of millions per year in additional taxes voluntarily ...

What does the average person have to do to provide their family this kind of security?

I don't think copyright needs to do double duty as life insurance and it is mostly not helpless widows that are benefitting from it.

And what about the creator that has a husband and family and passes away a day after publication in an accident?

The same rules that apply to a survivor's pension could apply to copyright, although I don't think that is a good solution myself - I think it will get messy with copyright transfers made in life, decisions made by owners/publishers/media/regulators that might de-prioritize the printing/marketing of that copyrighted material, etc. Even during the life the copyright creator, copyright rights are no substitute for a survivor's pension. In line with another answer below:

"What does the average person have to do to provide their family this kind of security? I don't think copyright needs to do double duty as life insurance and it is mostly not helpless widows [widowers] that are benefitting from it."

> The 100 year expiration is necessary for encouraging people to make new things rather than just shitty fan works until the end of our lifetimes.

People like whom? Disney?

This comment is fake. Right?