If your work is not going to enter the public domain then there's no contract - the state then is enforcing a monopoly against the interests of the people.
Disney can make a profit of 100s of millions on a movie within a few years. They don't need anything like as much as 20 years.
They will of course retain their trademarks, and I think this is only right in a realistic IP environment.
>relaxed copyright laws //
Relaxation general means less strict or less firmly applied. This suggests an assumption that the state should grant a monopoly - there should be no such assumption but instead the application of a strict limited time contract in accordance with the original purposes of the law.
That wasn't my intention. I wanted to emphasize that it already has. I think the state should work to ensure the creation of public goods and I think that they should relax copyright laws.
I'd love to read a rigorous analysis of this idea:
> Disney can make a profit of 100s of millions on a movie within a few years. They don't need anything like as much as 20 years. > They will of course retain their trademarks, and I think this is only right in a realistic IP environment.
You sound like you know what you're talking about here. What you're claiming is that digital media is a public good. I can live with that definition. It's certainly non-rival, and in practice is fairly non-excludable.
You then go on to claim that companies should just find a way to survive without copyright. The problem with this approach is that the creation of these public goods will be far below the social optimum without some sort of market interventions [1].
I definitely don't think that aggressive copyright law is the correct way to address the free rider problem. However, I think that it's shortsighted to create a necessarily inefficient market. It makes sense that companies like Disney want longer copyright, as that's how they capture the positive externalites of their work, and are able to keep producing it. Someone who is politically savvy and trying to solve this problem would look through possible solutions to the free-rider problem [2] and use them to formulate a way that producers and consumers can both benefit from relaxed copyright laws.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions