I don't think your concerns about 7 or 14 year terms are actually necessary: > However, you do need to protect individuals from corporations. This is generall

I don't think your concerns about 7 or 14 year terms are actually necessary: > However, you do need to protect individuals from corporations. This is generally true, so much so that I think the only relevant action would need to be general, to protect individuals from corporations generally. Creators would benefit from protection regardless of whether the term is changed. > If I submit a book to a publisher, they say "no", then they hold it for 14 years and decide to publish it ... I'd still want to be protected. Presumably a much greater proportion of work would be prepaid (via mechanisms like the built-in ads on youtube videos) or self-published. Although they continue to add value, publishers are much less necessary at the moment than previously (as we can see from independent podcasts). The marketplace and output might be completely different if there are short terms, but it will not lead to a collapse in production or a failure to remunerate artists. In any case, the authors of copyright material are not presently engaged in free and equal relations with corporations. If nothing else, a corporation is generally able to sue you, whereas you're generally not able to sue a corporation. And a corporation will write contracts that regularly get tested in courts and get tweaked and improved, whereas you will rarely write contracts and you will rarely have opportunity to improve them based on problems. > Visual artists, painters say, often become popular later in their career; should commercial interests be able to exploit that lag to sell the person's earlier work without the person getting reward? This doesn't happen because their work obtains some additional quality through the passage of time, as though it were a wine ageing in oak. It happens because of the reputation of the artist; by buying the work, the owner has some kind of a relationship with a well reputed person. If anyone is selling a print, the print that is personally authorised by the artist will have a higher value. Therefore, I would suppose this isn't a problem that needs to be fixed. None of this means that everything would continue just fine. Reducing copyright to a few years would be revolutionary. It would result in actual cultural changes. For instance, right now you can use copyright to create artificial scarcity that lasts essentially forever. With a seven year copyright, the artificial scarcity only lasts a few years, so you need to make the most of it. That means that oldness is free and recency is expensive - a reversal of the current system (where oldness is expensive, because it costs more to get something that last a long time, but recency is cheap)