personally I do not take such a hard line, I think a more limited form of copyright does have a place in allowing authors to profit from their work. I think wh

personally I do not take such a hard line, I think a more limited form of copyright does have a place in allowing authors to profit from their work. I think what doesn't work is a massive, blanket term applied across all works. The situation we have currently is a handful of extremely valuable works which get milked for decades and decades, and huge bulk of material which is left to rot into obscurity because it is untouchable under current copyright law. I have experience of this with a project I run collating historic material on climbing and mountaineering: pre-internet a lot of the discourse happened in magazines, and this discourse is generally pretty hard to get your hands on. You need to track down physical copies of obscures mags that have been mouldering away in someone's attic for the last 40 years. If you talk to the authors of the content in these magazines, none of them are bothered about trying to make money of 500 words of copy they wrote 40 years ago, but because of the current massive copyright terms this stuff will not become public domain for 80-90 years in many cases, by which time I am sure finding physical copies of this material will be very difficult. I would like to see a much more limited term by default (20 years from publication perhaps?) which still gives an author plenty of time to capitalise on their work. I think it should then be possible to renew your copyright claim (every 10 years say?) but at an increasingly high cost. £250 the first time, £500 second time, £1000 third time etc. This would mean the bulk of material would fall out of copyright on a much shorter timescale, while if you happen to have made something popular and you want to keep benefiting then you can up to a point.