I am ok with copywriter being lifetime plus. Often a creator doesn't see benifits of their material til many decades after creation. And they created this so during their life it seems fair they can use.
Patents on the other hand I feel should be dropping in time scale. Technology is advancing more rapidly yet we extend protection no reduce it to match generally faster cycles of development. Shortening patents to 20 years type thing would be a far more important step. Also strengthening the rule that a patent is void where something has been created independently even if second to market so there isn't a race to patent first what is bound to be discovered soon by many.
>Often a creator doesn't see benifits of their material til many decades after
Is this the common case? It would seem logical that most content makes the most amount of money soon after it comes out. I think for many kinds of content, the first week makes about as much as the rest of the lifetime of sales.
And even in the rare case where some content becomes rediscovered after the 30 years, the creator simply needs to create a sequel, which by having their name attached to it, will be recognized as the official continuation.
I'm having trouble finding the source (I suspect a brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft), but I recall reading that over 90% of books are out of print within 3 years of their initial publication. I've also seen claims that it's typical for heavily marketed movies and video games to make roughly half of their total revenue in the first week of release, though I'm not sure where to find the actual numbers for that, and it probably doesn't account for re-releases (DVD, "HD remaster", etc.).
edit: Based on skimming some numbers at vgchartz.com, it looks like the basic shape of the claim for heavily marketed video games is right, but the revenue half-life is more like three or four weeks.
Where authors make money from their books they make it within a few years of publication. Where they make money from an adaption of their book it can be decades later. For example, Philip K Dick wrote Minority Report in 1956 but the film wasn't made until 2002 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adaptations_of_works_b...). Lord of the Rings was written in 1937 and made in to the major films in 2001. More recently Game Of Thrones took 15 years or so before being adapted for TV.
Those authors deserve a decent price for the film rights to their work. 30 year copyrights would significantly change that.
> Lord of the Rings was written in 1937 and made in to the major films in 2001.
Although the rights that permitted those films were sold in 1969.
Film rights are a particularly interesting case where they get sold and traded around potentially for decades before something is actually produced, if ever.
Absolutely! For artists, the price of their paintings is a function of their popularity, which more often than not comes later in life. When and if it strikes it doesn't matter, on what stage of life the exact painting was created, they all become more expensive.
Patents on the other hand I feel should be dropping in time scale. Technology is advancing more rapidly yet we extend protection no reduce it to match generally faster cycles of development. Shortening patents to 20 years type thing would be a far more important step. Also strengthening the rule that a patent is void where something has been created independently even if second to market so there isn't a race to patent first what is bound to be discovered soon by many.