Like.what. I hear this a lot but not much way of real examples.

You hold on to.copyright of.a song you sang when you were 8 and isnt making any money? So what ?

what's the downside here?

People who have more money can keep longer copyrights easier. That's the problem.

if they're making enough money off of it that they can afford the fees, then it's working as intended.

I think that for the person who suggested the idea, this would be considered success--creative products that aren't being actively used should revert to the commons.

But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.

Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.

Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.

The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.

On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.