It would be so nice if copyright was 10 or 20 years and this was unquestionably legal.
Nice thought but unlikely give the copyright bloodhounds about. A better short-term approach would be to change copyright to make access to orphan and neglected works legal so long as one has no pecuniary interest in them. This would free up huge swathes of copyrighted works.
Whilst that makes sense, it is opposed by new/existing copyright holders who see the freeing up of these works as competition—even if the orphaned works bear little resemblance to the new works (which is usually the case)—on the grounds that making these works available 'dilutes' the market for newer works (a spurious argument if ever I've heard of one). Another objection comes from a mob of carpetbaggers who want access to them for commercial purposes, that is if said works ever become available (all sorts of strange arrangements have been proposed). Thus the stalemate continues, nothing is done.
No wonder piracy exists.
BTW a while back I posted a link on YouTube to a 1920s audio recording whose author died about 80 years ago only to get a note from Google that someone still claimed copyright over the work. Seems this lark is done automatically by the mischievous copyright lobby even if there is no such claim by the original author. Incidentally, Google didn't remove the work (presumably on grounds that they were already aware of the 'scam' but were obliged to advise me anyway in case I objected).
Right, the copyright system stinks as presently constituted.
Just to be sure, schemes to protect owners exist and could be implemented. For example, all works in this category would appear in published lists with say a year's grace—if the copyright owner turns up within the grace period with proof of ownership then the work remains in copyright.
There's another type material that we do not normally think of as being in copyright but in fact is. That's things like circuit diagrams, blueprints, plans, etc. from, say, obsolete equipment where the company has long gone bankrupt. Often there was no payment made for this info in the first instance as it came with the equipment (as manuals etc.). Denying it now on a copyright 'technicality' stops maintenance industries, hobbyists etc. from building repair infrastructures and such.
As a society we do this policy selfishly, because we’d like people to be encouraged and incentivized to create original works that touch peoples lives.
I agree that the purpose of copyright should be to encourage production of work and culture. I don't think encouraging people to coast on one great artwork for their entire lives does that. At this point you are extracting value from society without adding anything new back.
Of course this starts interacting with other policy decisions in interesting ways. I don't think you should struggle to live because you don't want to become a slave to making more, I think you could pair this with some sort of Universal Basic Income so that you will be assured basic comforts no matter what. However you are still encouraged to work more if you want more luxuries.
What if you created the work at 18 but only after 15 years did anyone notice it? No dice? We'd prefer that all the profits from people reading on their kindles should go Amazon and some publishing service that aggregates out of copyright works instead of the guy who wrote it?
We're better off as a society if the returns to the massive part of the Spotify library that is over 10 years old, that enriches the lives of hundreds of millions of people every day, just goes to Daniel Ek instead?
This is better?
What do you mean no dice? In this scenario, you'd still have the last ten years of work still under copyright and a big platform for pushing subsequent works.
It's not just the US unfortunately.
> Or book authors whose work is picked up decades later
This is an interesting one. I think this rings close to the "dilution" argument. Where movie studios will be more likely to wait until copyright expires than pay the author. I think this is a legitimate concern but I don't know how big of a deal it is. There are already many public domain works but studios still choose new stories where they need to pay the other. Obviously shorter copyright periods will shift this equation but IDK how much. Likely it makes sense to move slowly here, start at a high number like 80 years and slowly reduce it to see if this becomes a huge problem.