Given that the average lifespan is around 75 years, a 50 year copyright represents the vast majority of a person's adult life. For the artist, I don't think the

Given that the average lifespan is around 75 years, a 50 year copyright represents the vast majority of a person's adult life. For the artist, I don't think there's much difference between that and perpetuity. And those artists it does affect, such as Sir Cliff Richard, have not exactly been fans of the limit ;) As for how to apply a continual update model to music, I'm not certain. I'm not a musician, so I couldn't venture a guess. But it seems to me that there isn't going to be a lot of money to be made in future from licensing past hits. The software industry manages okay, but perhaps you're right and music can't use the same model. In which case, musicians need to find another model that works, or slowly be consumed by a world where copying is increasingly cheap and increasingly hard to prosecute. As for patents, it's my position that people should not be able to patent software. Fortunately for me, that's still the case in the EU.