Jumping the licensing shark

> > You've just destroyed authors, musicians, software writers, anybody's hopes of making money.

> In context (that you were proposing lifelong copyright terms, renewable for the lives of heirs, indefinitely: i.e. infinitely long copyright terms, in effect), this is ridiculous. Almost all income from almost all copyrighted works occurs in the first decade: after that it's minimal except for a very few very famous works (think LOTR or Charles Dickens or something like that).

Except that what I was proposing is WEAKER copyright than today.

"Heirs alive at creation" - hardly "infinitely long". Given that a fair few places now have "life plus 95", it will be noticeably shorter in most cases. Especially as most people are most prolific when they are young, when they are trying to impress the females ... In a LOT of cases, it will be less than "life plus 50", and quite likely the heirs will not be able to renew because the copyright was born before they were.

And it should cost to renew copyright. Which means that many copyrights will be abandoned long before then. Which is the idea ...

Replacing copyright with trademark will also make legal copies much easier, even if it is "only for personal use" - the more copies, the more likely stuff is to survive.

Don't try to get Utopia today. One step at a time.

Cheers,
Wol