Maybe 100 years after birth instead.

That’s a disincentive to authors in their later years if it’s a straight rule.

We’d need something like a minimum of 20 years or up to their 100th birthday or something.

Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding your only motivation to create or share anything is the opportunity to extract as much value from society as possible.

Many people find motivation to give to their heirs in their last phase of life.

I don't see anyone here judging you for going to work and wanting to be compensated for your efforts. But suddenly authors are "extract[ing] as much value from society as possible"? That's just rude. If we're being honest, it's much better for society that an author gets that money than someone working at Facebook.

Imagine being in the last phase of life and finding you have to work full time as a Walmart greeter because you can’t support yourself as a working artist anymore due to ageist pricks being in charge of policy.

This isn't a bad idea. It would prevent the constant recycling of copyrighted works and bias the creative economy towards newer works. It seems the bias is in the other direction at the moment.

Taking the death date into account is literally already how prevailing copyright law works. You can just make it conditional on publish date.

Sure, but Life + 70 means it is unlikely that anyone will benefit from the death soon.

One provision of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act [0] (which expired 6 months after passage of the law) allowed next-of-kin to revoke (the sale of) copyrights sold by the author without recourse (by the folks who paid for them). Allegedly, this was added by Disney in order to cut costs hundreds of millions of dollars in a dispute over licensing Winnie The Pooh IP/rights [1].

Expect something similar when the next big author dies; my prediction: JK Rowling.

Notes:

0 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/senate-bill/505

1- https://hughstephensblog.net/2023/12/18/winnie-the-poohs-cop...

TBF there's currently a massive perverse incentive in that we want to encourage creators to create, but then allow the successful ones to retire making money from past works.

The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.

Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party. The residuals on the other hand are quite concrete, particularly when an author's preferences are capping the market for their work or when the publicity of their death will create newfound popularity.

The distinction between author and their estates is fascinating: the stereotype is estates mismanaging the art, but that usually happens because the estates want to be “artistic” themselves.

Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.

JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).

Imagine what a better world we would live in if the Tolkien estate was able to kill D&D in the cradle as they would have liked...

/s

> The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.

An estate tax of 100% would eliminate this moral hazard; but the estate tax is already unpopular when its exemption amount means that few estates pay any tax.

> Any benefit from the work being public domain is diffuse, it won't create a windfall for any particular party.

A defendant in a copyright infringement case would have a windfall if the copyright was extinguished as a result of an untimely death.

> The inheritors are in a better position to kill the author-- or just allow them to die from neglect-- and are incentivized to do so by postmortem profits.

This is true now, with or without copyright reform. If the author fears, they can make a will or trust, just like it is today. Not sure why this consideration would factor as a negative signal.