There's a good argument that copyright should be quite short. Corporations generally want a return on their money within five or ten years (or however long the

There's a good argument that copyright should be quite short. Corporations generally want a return on their money within five or ten years (or however long the CEO's stock options take to vest), maximum, so a five or ten year copyright term will secure exactly as much investment in copyrighted works as a 500 year term will. There's a second good argument that Congress ought not to extend the terms of works already created, since that is always just a giveaway to the copyright holders and never does anything useful for society. The article is making the second argument, not the first.