> The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne), but 10 is better for today's age.

I'd vote for politicians who push for laws like this. Sadly none do.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technolibertarianism

At least here the pirate party focuses more on green and far left politics than digital freedom these days.

Should GPLv3 code be licensed to the public domain after 10 years too?

I mean the goal of GPLv3 and other copyleft licenses is to ensure that innovation building on the licensed work is also made available so others may continue to innovate, no? In my mind reducing copyright terms is aligned to that goal. You can disagree with that goal, but I don’t see anything inconsistent about reducing copyright terms and allowing copyleft to extend for a longer period.

Even so, I think in most cases if a piece of software has been unedited for 10 years it’s either feature-complete or obsolete. If it’s been under development for those 10 years, the original version being released into the public domain probably isn’t a significant threat to innovation by way of closed source improvements being made.

Yes.

My understanding is that the whole reason GPL has its stipulations is to counter-balance the lack of commons caused by commercial exploitation and expansion of copyright. So yes.

I completely agree, that's the part that I like about the GPL. That's why I'm a bit iffy about removing copyright outright (as it would mostly affect open source projects, proprietary software rarely has an available source that would be made free by such a move). But I see the point.