The crazy long Disney thing, though, is what it is because of lobbying muscle.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect to be able to continue to make money after you are dead. Earn enough during your lifetime to provide for your surviving daughters, sure, but I don't like the idea of someone being able to posthumously put a gag on people's ability to express themselves just so that their kids can get a nice inheritance.
Another example is Grant’s autobiography, which he wrote as he was dying of throat cancer. No way he would have done that without copyright.
Why not?
For centuries people wrote books so that they would have a legacy and be remembered. They wrote because they felt it was the right thing to do, or because they wanted to control the narrative around their lives. Do you have any specific reason to believe that Grant wrote his autobiography to provide for his successors, rather than just to have written it?
I understand the theory about incentivizing people to create, but honestly I'm not convinced that what we get from that deal is worth it. Too often it feels like extended copyright creates a similar set of incentives to advertising—sure, we get more works, but the best works would have been written even with a much shorter copyright because the author had something they wanted to say. The works that are being incentivized by long copyrights are the ones that we could do without.
That said, at the time of Grant's writing copyright in the US was 28 years (with an optional extension for another 14 if the author lived long enough), which means that OP's proposal of 25 years would likely have been sufficient to motivate Grant.
I'd much prefer that to the current life + 70 years or 95 years after publication.
Was his creation of his autobiography primarily motivated by money? I would assume not.
Their works go out of print but they're still copyrighted so people can't legally reproduce them (for profit or otherwise).
My grandfather was a published author with some success but he's dead and his stuff is no longer in print. No one in my family is going to see revenue from his work. No one outside of his generation (when he was successful) will ever have a chance to read his books as they're impossible to find now.
Most books written in the 20th century are basically gone from public availability.[1][2]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-m...
[2] https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/How_Copyright_Keeps_Works...
Does the family not have rights to those works? A copy of the books? Scan them and release them copyright free if you want the world to see them.
So having a limited ability to pass on that asset if you die prematurely seems only fair—you'd have the same option if you were building something physical—but we shouldn't use inheritance as an argument for longer copyright. The question of how long someone should be allowed to earn money from a work should be orthogonal from the question of whether that right to earn money should be inheritable.
This is the flaw in life plus 70—it assumes that copyright should last indefinitely during one's lifetime and then provide for successors. I'd rather see a flat rate for how long we're comfortable locking up a work in copyright, successors or otherwise.
Does it really? Sure, timeless classics pay out over a long period of time but they are by far the exception. I'll wager that the vast majority of copyrighted works make the vast majority of their money in the first decade. So why do we need essentially perpetual copyright? (Essentially perpetual because almost none of the works created in my lifetime will ever pass out of copyright before I die)
I agree. I think OP's proposal of a fixed term of 25 years is more than reasonable. All I'm saying is that it should be inheritable and not based on when the author dies.
On the other hand copies of writing are not scarce. We can give copies to everyone who wants one for practically free. Property rights for copies of writing are therefore artificial. Creating artificial scarcity where none exists has real costs that in many cases outweigh the benefits.
There's no reason any other IP should be longer.
Why is that reasonable? Why should someone's daughters get a free ride instead of having to work for a living like everyone else?
Either we have a system where people earn wealth on merit, or we have a feudal aristocracy with extra steps. It can't be both.
The same cannot be said of most people today, and I therefore agree that it's a bad argument for long copyright terms in a modern context.