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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I have a slightly different take.

Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.

Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.

Without it big publishing companies would just publish stuff without paying royalties, because they could can just do that. With 75 years it will be also some inheritance for authors children - should we also let publishing companies just take that?

There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".

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Could always leave the timescales as-is, but have a break clause — if your work generates more than $xM in sales it's now out of copyright.

Would protect the non-Star Wars/Harry Potters, but also let us recognise that SW/HP/LotR _have_ become part of our shared culture and it does wider society little benefit to give one company a monopoly on them

So the business model "write once, get paid for the rest of your life" should get built into law? I'm trying to think of an analogous situation. Should Architects get commission on rent for the rest of their life?

> There is much more not that successful works that still earn money and need protection from publishing houses than there is "Harry Potters".

There are many more non successful books, I agree. I doubt many of them are still available, much less making noteworthy money, after 20 years. This is based on my experience trying to buy obscure books, I tried to find actual numbers but was unsuccessful.

> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings. Pennies dripping from works you published are your life line that lets you buy food or sustain you in a way.

Why should we all pay to make that a viable way of life?

> Everyone who claims 20 years is more than enough is looking at highly successful works.

I would argue the opposite: that for non-bestsellers, income after 20 years is completely negligible. NO one is buying 2nd rate fiction 20 years after it was first published, only bestsellers will still sell a significant fraction after that long.

I also don't see how potential income 20 years later could ever effectively motivate or enable a person...

I'd much rather solve the problem of starving people separately from copyright, maybe some form of Universal Basic Income. That way we can handle it for everyone who is in a rough situation without requiring them to get lucky enough with a moderately successful book.

You (we?) need to solve attribution bias first.

Art? VR?

Is copyright itself responsible for incentivising a pro-intergenerational wealth world view?

> Imagine that you are not that popular author whose works are his life savings.

I'm sorry but there are certain lines of work that are simply not profitable. Maybe earning a living by being a not popular author is (should be) just not possible?

As much as I dislike big corporations abusing the system, like Disney, that’s a good point. In particular for novelists and artists, it can take decades for discovery and subsequent appreciation of their work.

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