Or she could buy actual life insurance, rather than enforcing a bizarro version via a grant of monopoly whose value depends on the immediate commercial value of a creative work.

I'm guessing most authors don't write a book for life insurance purposes, just that the fact that a standard 15 year term is probably more beneficial to most people than a term based on when you die.

> so if the author conks right after her first book her family doesn't starve.

If I died one month after starting a new programming job, my employer wouldn't pay a salary to my family for 15 years.

I'm not sure why society has to take care of the family of an author but not a programmer.

That's not really at all comparable. With writing, unless you get an advance on an unwritten book, you first work for months or years unpaid, and then (if you're lucky) you get an up-front sale payment and then royalties for a while. What would you think if you started a new programming job, kicked the bucket after 29 days, and your employer tried to claim that they didn't have to give your last paycheck to your family because you didn't finish the month?

Death or 15 years seems fair to me.

If you built a house one month after you died, would you expect it to be given to the state?

IP is more about property than a job, I think.

> If you built a house one month after you died,

Nice trick, that.

Most of it, yes, in the form of estate taxes. Unless the heir is a spouse.

Hereditary transfer of IP is a bizarre anachronism.

John Oliver did a bit in his wealth gap segment where he mentioned that, in the US, estate taxes are exempt even to children on amounts up to 5 million, and up to 10 million if it's a couple leaving the amount to their children.

General searching around turns up these numbers here and there as well. Assuming that is in fact true, _most_ people shouldn't be giving up anything in estate taxes.

> Most of it, yes, in the form of estate taxes.

Estate taxes in the US are 40% and the first ~$5 million in value is exempt. So its impossible to lose most of any estate to estate taxes in the US, and very few estates (0.14% [1]) are subject to any estate tax at all.

[1] http://www.cbpp.org/files/estatetaxmyths.pdf

What if an author writes a book that no one wants to buy, right before croaking and leaving the family to starve? Most published books probably earn very little for their authors, yet people tend to think of a copyright as this guarantee of comfortable living.