I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.
That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.
It seems unlikely to me that he ever bothered to think about copyright
Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. Authors are basically an afterthought.
In regards to countries with weaker copyright enforcement, I think there's a bit of an inversion. Most countries that fail to properly enforce copyright do so due to a lot of structural issues, which also hamper creative thinking for independent reasons. China would be an example of a country with weaker copyright enforcement but also with good infrastructure, and it seems to be overtaking (if it already didn't) the US in terms of creative production (both for copyright and patents).
That depends on the country. There are moral rights [0] which are usually non-transferable from the authors. That’s especially the case in the European tradition of copyright: “In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even broadly waive their moral rights. This follows a tradition in European copyright itself, which is regarded as an item of property which cannot be sold, but only licensed.”
> The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. [...] Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.
Also from [0]
- In Shakespeare's day, the physical ordeal of setting type, printing, binding, etc. were a non-trivial moat against copying of printed works. Not so now.
- Shakespeare was closely associated with London theaters and companies of actors. Selling tickets for performances (of plays he'd written) was a far better way to make money than trying to sell scripts.
I’m not saying we are entitled to those efforts but clearly people are willing to do it.
Do you think no one was publishing anything before the year 1500?
I mean, your question is basically right. People won't do things if they won't get compensated. But copyright isn't even a large portion of the compensation people get from authoring works.