"These people's work is characterized be low output and hit and miss success. A writer might complete a two dozen works and two of which make any money. So you

"These people's work is characterized be low output and hit and miss success. A writer might complete a two dozen works and two of which make any money. So you need protection on the order of a human lifetime." Whereas programmers are always successful? And the reason given here for "protection on the order of human lifetime" is spurious, since the longer copyright terms are more for the benefit of corporate, rather than individual, creators. Commercial viability has no bearing on whether a work is eligible for copyright. There's really no aspect of software that couldn't be covered by copyright, except perhaps the requirement of 'novelty'--certain categories are not copyrightable, but in the case of software, its really the novelty of the whole work that counts. The important thing about copyright and patents here is that they're supposed to be mutually exclusive--categories of things that are patentable are not copyrightable, and vice versa.