That's a beautiful utopia, but sadly I don't think it would fly in today's world. Also, short copyrights serve a useful purpose of encouraging invention. It's the length of time that's the problem, not that it exists.

Copyrights don't serve much of a purpose for inventions. Patents on the other hand...

Actually they prevent a competitor blatantly ripping off entire chunks of your work verbatim. This encourages spending time on R&D that you otherwise wouldn't be able to justify because "our competitor will just copy-paste it".

You don't need anything remotely like life of the author plus an additional half of a lifetime to realize that protection though.

Kim not sure what schematics have to do with copyright. But removing copyrights will essentially end the era of professional artists. It won't be impossible, but it will be difficult to be an author it musician for a living. The era of multi million dollar budget movies will end.

You're right. All that pesky GPL code should just be public domain right? I'm sure RMS would dig that.

So Spotify should just keep 100% of revenue for themselves instead of paying royalties?

Why would Spotify have revenue? Surely we would all download our music at the tiny marginal cost of the required internet bandwidth.

I guess all the artists will love freely distributing their music as charity.