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Comment by davidweatherall | Hacker News Reader

If copyrights disappeared after death, from a business standpoint it would become much harder to value a copyright when you also have to factor in the chance of the author dying and you immediately losing the related IP.

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The fact that the authors death factors in at all automatically makes a young person's IP more valuable than an old person's. That's a really dumb system. It should expire x years after creation and the author's death should be irrelevant.

A more harmonious option could be X years or until the authors death, whichever is higher.

It preserves the “you own your work for your natural life”. Whether that’s what copyright should be is a separate question, and I think the answer is absolutely not, but easier to change gradually than all at once.

If X in death + X years is big enough, then age becomes less of a factor. Most IP's value drops as time goes on. In the majority of cases, after 70 years the value of IP is approaching zero, a further 10-50 years dependent on the creator's age won't have much more of an affect on the value that IP can create.

I agree X years after creation sounds like a much better system though.

Well, you could do 20 years after publication or 10 years after death, whichever comes sooner. Or maybe 10 and 5. I think most books make money only in the first few years anyway (but you want to make the term long enough that people aren't going to wait it out).

Depending on the length of the term, this may not work so well for types of books that have a longer tail (e.g., sheet music), but the current system has drawbacks too.

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