Agreed - but societal interests are a mix of the constituents within the society which can be in conflict as a well as the overall society as a whole. We want to protect the rule of law, both legal and social norms surrounding property rights, we want to enable the free expression and production of cultural goods, we want to ensure artists can profit off their work. My take is that amongst people discussing this there is a rough agreement that IP rights (both copywrite and patents) should be weakened at least in duration, but no consensus on the specifics, and their is a concentrated lobby of rights holders that wants to maintain their legal ability extract rents from their collections. We wouldn't be served well be crashing the whole system (not implying the parent comment suggested this) but that means we need to figure out how to change things at the margin within the current political climate. One compromise I've been trying to push is to require payment to continue to maintain the exclusivity. Shorten the default timeframes, but require fees to relicense the material. Perhaps we could also require that the material get sent to an archive as part of this to ensure it kept (at the right's holders expense). If the LoC isn't up to it, they could authorize third parties. Make the fees higher (and increase them over time) to disincentivize extension of everything. This tradeoff means that the biggest properties - Disney films say - do get long extensions, but that doesn't lock up everything else. Same thing with patents. Also we can get more creative with mandatory licensing. The main innovation here is to stop making the cutoff such a hard boundary which makes things more contentious.