I made no suggestion of a term that ended on the author's death in my previous post. I was simply pointing out that even a span of 20 years is a significant pro

I made no suggestion of a term that ended on the author's death in my previous post. I was simply pointing out that even a span of 20 years is a significant proportion of the period we expect someone to be a productive member of society. I believe it reasonable to require that someone competes with others at least three times in their working life. Although, now that you've brought it up, 10 years with expiry on death of the author sounds fantastic. Authors are incentivised to create new works and companies are incentivised to purchase them. A balance must be struck between rewarding individuals for their work and preventing corporations from monopolising cultural touchstones. I feel like you're overestimating the financial longevity of the overwhelming majority of works. Most are forgotten about a few years after their release. The ones that aren't will typically have made more than enough money for the author to live lavishly for the rest of their life. > The extra value realized by a term of 70 years versus 56 (the 1909 number) is, in significant part, realized during the author's lifetime. It gives them something more valuable to sell. I sincerely doubt that for the vast majority of works publishers are signing contracts based on anything other than how much they think it'll sell in the first year at most. Given that authors struggle to be paid at all unless they've already found massive commercial success, it seems obvious that the only party benefiting from longer copyright terms is the company. There seems to be a belief that the expiry of the copyright period precludes the author from monetising the work further, whereas it simply means they will begin to compete with others for that monetisation. With a 10+ year head start and humans typically preferring to reward the original creator they should do okay for themselves. Our current intellectual property regime is fundamentally opposed to how human culture has developed and progressed. It's difficult to imagine how barren a world we'd live in if our predecessors had sought to limit any retelling of a story that wasn't approved by the original author. It's a condemnation of our society that the retelling of many of these stories has been criminalised by a company that found much of it's success in retelling the very same.