Sure! Yes! I agree! 100 years is way too long. 20 years is much more reasonable. But the comment that I was responding to (and many others in this thread) are advocating for the complete removal of copyright, and that's what I'm responding to.
I was simply reminding people what direction we should go in, and what the stakes are. Reducing copyright terms is a great solution, and yes something between 2 and 12 years is probably the right number to aim for as a first step. I agree with the above commenter that 20 is far too long, because 20-year-old material is slipping into irrelevance in many cases.
It's also good to remember that the only reason we have copyright (in the US, where "moral rights" are not a thing) is to stimulate the creation of more work. So we need to think about what configuration of copyright law actually stimulates more work, and we need to be willing to experiment.
If I make a YouTube video and live another 60 years, then people copying that video would still be committing copyright infringement in the year 2150.
That's just insane.
Constitution days “for a limited time”. Death of author + 99 is effectively unlimited to the perspective of typical human
For the life of a human, yes, for the life of a corporation, it's long but not too long. Specially for corporations such as Disney which are sure to last for quite a while.
Not saying this is a justificable position. I'm actually in favour of drastically reducing copyright (I believe 7 to 15 years might be a sweetspot). But a lot of laws are not made for regular human people any longer.
On top of that, knowledge moves too fast these days for a 20 year right to be useful for society.