For copyrights, in the purest form, what do you really get from letting it expire? The only really tangible benefit is to allow people to obtain the work without having to pay anyone, and (theoretically) make it easier to preserve and distribute orphaned works without the permission of the creator. It seems like as a lawmaker, it's really not that hard to rationalize saying "I can pass this legislation, extending copyright, or I can directly cause Disney to forfeit X million dollars in revenue".
At least with a patent expiration, you can counterweight that by saying "I can extend the patent, and Boeing continues to get X dollars, or I can allow the patent to expire, and other companies get to use that invention to make Y dollars." The tradeoff is a little clearer.
I would love to see better rules for copyrights moving to the public domain, not so much for the sake of Mickey Mouse, but rather for obscure and orphaned works, as well as simply decreasing the cost for the consumer to improve accessibility. But it's very easy in my mind to see why this is unlikely to happen.
Derivative works are where most off the societal value lies. Something like videogame publishers owning any footage of their game being played is absurd.
You seem to be forgetting about derivative works.
Or mashups - perhaps your Columbo novel could feature Mickey Mouse...
Let me tell you about it. There are three interleaved narratives.
One is about an elderly actor who played the TV role for so long that he's no longer sure if he's an actor or the actual detective. The second is about a real life police detective called Frank Columbo who is plagued by his identity with the fictional detective and who he resembles in almost every particular. The third is about the actual Columbo.
All three are simultaneously solving different murders, all of which have their exposition up front - in the classic Columbo style.
We did it Red.. HackerNews :)
For copyrights there is no resistance with deep pockets.
No business really benefits that much from expired copyright. When Disney lobbies to extend copyright, who is going to spend millions to fight them?
I am hopping one day everyone will be feed up and there will be millions in funding.
Personally I don't think this gets fixed till we can give special copyright to Disney and other corporations and free up the other 99.5% of copyright.
This feels like a fight that Silicon Valley companies should take on.
Not completely true. Businesses could exist even with indefinite patents by licensing them (see MP3 patent).
Copyright regulates mostly matters between large media companies and individual consumers.
In theory, patents have good and bad side effects. The good effect of a patent is that it encourages people to spend lots of money on R&D because it gives them a period of time to recoup that investment once they bring something to market. The bad effect, obviously, is that this artificial monopoly can prevent other people from bringing similar things to market. But it's (again, in theory) a net good because the end result is that it creates an additional financial incentive to create new things, and once the patent expires then the negative aspect goes away. You are left with new stuff that may not have otherwise been brought into existence.
The goal of a patent system is to benefit the population as a whole, not patent holders, even though patent holders benefit from it as well. If it only benefitted patent holders, and didn't have this philosophical underpinning of benefitting everyone, we wouldn't have patent laws in the first place.
Copyright is similar in that it is designed with known pros and cons, but is legally rationalized as being a net good for society. The goal of copyright is to create an environment in which more stuff is created overall. The ultimate legal justification for copyright is the overall positive effect on society, it is not to benefit the copyright holder (that's just a happy side effect for them).
So it's a weird dynamic where both the patent system and copyright law exist to benefit society, but all of the money poured into changing it is going to come from IP holders who want to manipulate the law so that they can make more money than they are now. There are no lobbyists representing "all of society", unfortunately, so it's a very one-sided battle that only ends when judges and legislators push back on the IP holders.
To answer the question, I'm guessing that it's much easier to push for extending copyright because the societal cost to that is much less clear. It's easy to make an argument that (for example) pharmaceutical patents should not be extended because people will suffer. Cheaper drugs don't come until patents expire and competition is allowed to take its course.
On the other hand, it's harder to make a case for the harm done by extending the period of time in which (for example) only Disney can sell Mickey Mouse t-shirts, so it's a lot easier for the entertainment industry to lobby for longer copyright periods than it is for other industries to lobby for longer patent periods.
We have been told that copyright makes it possible that authors can live from their hard work. This interest needs to be balanced against the needs of the common good. It is known that free access to information encourages innovation.
Some works need more time to generate revenue for the authors, others hit the market furiously and could be released after a short time.
Therefore I propose a minimal copyright time of 5 years from the date of publication. After that the owner sets a yearly fee to be paid by the owner. Someone can buy the work out of copyright by paying a multiple of the fee.
Say the copyright should last around 75 years. The owner declares to pay a fee of $10,000 the first year after the minimum of 5 years. The multiplicator could be then 70. If someone pays the owner $700,000 the book will immediately and irreversibly fall into public domain.