The original copyright act in the US granted protection for 14 years with an option for 14 year renewal. I think society would be much better served if we went back to that.
25 years seems fair.
But I find such rules create little more than traps for the lone creator or industry outsider; someone who is already at massive disadvantage in the industry. Unnecessary bits of procedure are naught but hand-outs to those who have the time to professionally game the system.
And companies [1] are highly unlikely to pass on paying a nominal fee [2] when the potential return is so high.
[1] Only companies are likely to have orphan works that are even known to exist by anyone willing to appropriate them.
[2] The fee must necessarily be nominal, lest you again disadvantage the lone creator/outsider.
And if you erode much off 14 years, it starts to sound unnecessarily short.
Just ask any writer, comedian or musician how long their original creations were kicking around before they got anyone interested in paying them for it. Several years is common for their pre-discovery work.
So to fix that, we can then either recognize the right of the author prior to publishing/exhibition with more complicated rules, or simply extend the term a little and maintain simplicity.
[1] Joe writes a book. He shows it to Bob for notes. Bob publishes it under his own name. The copyright would belong to Bob.
Anyways, if you can't move product in a few years, you should be trying something new.
Or just a case of publishers not wanting to publish more than X books a year from a given writer, regardless of output.
Those are books of course. Movie scripts are notorious for floating around Hollywood for years, sometimes decades.
† Assuming profit is the driving motivator, as copyright does.
So worrying that creators might sit by the proverbial poolside instead of creating new works seems silly to me and completely at odds with reality, even under our current copyright regime where copyright is effectively perpetual.
What I take into consideration when thinking about copyright terms, is trying to balance a reasonable time from which a creator can make a living off their work (given what we know about how creation happens), against a reasonable time before which others can try to make their living from that work.
As that is also what the public domain is about: freeing up old works for others to extend, adapt and interpret in their own attempt to make a living.
And along those lines, it's worth recognizing that there's a very real risk to the rate of 'new' creation that would come from shorter copyright terms. Should Mickey Mouse fall out of copyright, wouldn't the corporate incentive be to put Mickey Mouse into every children's work? (Particularly given the state of our risk-averse creative industries.)
The 'new' works we got might well start looking even more familiar than they do today.
It seems equally silly to worry about squeezing every ounce of profitability out of every work of art that we can think of, and for every edge case.
Artists will keep creating whether copyright is infinite or only 14 years. Maybe 22.7 years is optimal, but this is a boring discussion to have
Perhaps shift the perspective a little. What is reasonable time period for which others should be prevented from producing new work derived from the original? The problem I have is that copyright is at conflict with what we all know to be reality: most art is a product of our shared culture and only partly original. Copyright actually blocks the natural evolution of ideas and prevents society from benefiting from significant derived works.
Some creative works simply take a while to get going in the culture. I don't think we should punish creative folks who are, for lack of a better term, "ahead of their time." Obviously this concept could be taken to an absurd extreme, but I would argue that 25 years is better than 14. It's at least closer to the duration of a full human generation.
It isn't even obvious that Martin himself wouldn't benefit from the additional publicity of giving his earliest books away for free, then selling the sequels. Though I doubt it in this particular case, because of the whole HBO-series angle: presumably Martin is collecting royalties on the TV show, and collected option payments even before the show was made, and if the original book was out of copyright HBO needn't have paid these fees. But the works that are in peril aren't the ones that get optioned for movies and TV: Adapted works stay in print, if only as a form of tie-in merchandise for the show.
One side effect of making copyright terms short, as is being discussed, is that studios could freely make movies (video games, etc.) based on all but the most recent works without seeking approval or paying royalties.
And if HBO's adaptation of A Game of Thrones was popular but was relatively inaccessible since most people don't have an HBO subscription, any random person could make their own adaptation of the book and sell it cheaply and widely.
I'm not convinced I understand the full implications of this enough to make a definitive statement about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's definitely something that should be considered carefully.
But they would not necessarily be able to use the name "Game of Thrones" in the title, because thats a trademark. As long as he is alive he has that name available to him to distribute as he wishes.
I feel 5 year copyright + ability to renew it once for a total 10 year duration is plenty of time for government sponsored monopoly on distribution and derivation. Because that is all copyright is. But thanks to that system, almost any fan made Star Wars work is technically violating George Lucas' copyright on everything in the universe he made, and he could realistically sue a truckload of fan sites.
And you can't guarantee fair use saving them. It is intentionally vague, and it just takes one bad judge's ruling to change precedent (even at the Supreme Court level).
That said, given the state of lobbyists and legislation in the US, I sometimes feel that it's better for all of us that they aren't being given a shot at re-writing (and thus inevitably eroding) those rights.
It does society no good to have your grandchildren living off your legacy without an imperative to create their own.