Right now, a copyright holder has a monopoly on their IP: they alone can decide who can use their works, and at what price, for the entire duration of their cop

Right now, a copyright holder has a monopoly on their IP: they alone can decide who can use their works, and at what price, for the entire duration of their copyright. My suggestion was that that monopoly should only last a couple years (5? 10?), and then after that, it's a free-for-all. Re-print the book, adapt it to a movie, whatever, with the caveat that some fixed share (say, 1-5%, idk) of your revenue is owed to the creator. The way I see it, that's the best of both worlds. If your goal is non-commercial in nature (e.g., game preservationism), then you're free to redistribute for free. If your goal is commercial, you're making money off of someone else's work, pay some token royalties, but, here's the big "but": the original author doesn't get to say "No, you may not adapt my work this way". It even works for software copyright, with the caveat that you'd need to put some thought into how to deal with multiple claimants of royalties would work (since owing 50% of your revenue to 25 different authors seems excessive). Maybe have a cap of, say, 10% that, after reached gets subdivided based on some criteria. 18 months is flatly too short. Most creative works take longer than that between completion and market. You have to give artists some time to attempt to extract value from their work. Listen: J.K. Rowling is an evil bitch, but the world loved her work, and she was compensated as such. I feel the same way about Notch, of Minecraft fame. Guy's a dick, but it's hard to say he stole much of his fortune.