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Ask HN: Why should we keep or end patents/copyrights?

• tjr 11y ago
  As a software developer, writer, and musician / music producer, I personally still find value in copyright, but it has been taken to absurd heights. I would like to see it drastically reduced, preferably to a term of ~7 years. Maybe ~15 years at the absolute max. EDIT: Ah, I misread the question. Why?... The purpose of copyright, as I understand it, was to give authors [limited] exclusive opportunity to profit from their creative work, in order to promote more creative works being developed. Under the current system, an author could create a single work and profit from it forever. In some sense, that promotes more works, as more people hope to win the same lottery, but more typically, a single work isn't enough to live on. Continually creating more and more works is more sustainable as a business, and does more good for society. So give authors seven years to profit off of a single work, and then it is released into the public domain, for any author [still including the original author] to adapt into more new (and copyrightable) works. Is this a perfect solution? I don't know, probably not. I think it'd be quite nice to author a single work and live off royalties from it the rest of your life. But that doesn't seem to jive with the intent of copyright to promote the creation of more works.