> Corporations have hijacked a concept that should exist on human timescales.

I feel like this is true, but anytime I speak with colleagues in the arts (even UX and visual designers), they all say they are happy with copyright being lifetime of the owner + XX years. They (a) want the income for their legacy in case their products are still in use or appreciated decades later and (b) they want to control the output of their intellect.

As for the sniffling of creativity? They don't see that. If you can produce something, it's easy to only focus on the finer aspects.

An example would be software developers thinking only of code copyright as meaningfully applying to full applications but the functions that make up the codebase are just concepts easily reproduced, so it doesn't matter that technically the functions are also copyright protected.

I love the original 14+14. I’ve heard proposals for exponentially growing fees to allow truly big enterprises to stay copywritten longer, like 14+14 with filing and $100, another 14 for $100,000, another 14 for $10M, another 14 for $100M. That would allow 70 years or protection for a few key pieces of IP that are worth it, which seems like an okay trade off?

So many ideas better than the current regime.

I like the idea I heard about taxing based on the owner's view of value.

Give 14 years free.

Every year after that, the copyright holder has to tell you how much they think the work is worth to them. Then you tax them some (smallish) percentage of that.

Or, you can run some public fund-raiser to raise the amount of money they said it was worth, pay off the copyright holder, and then the work is in the public domain.

Why not have different copyright laws for corporations vs individuals? I'm no expert, just a dumb question I had. We could keep the copyrights longer for individuals, and add the 14+14 thing for corporations.

What about making people profit and enjoy life without having to push propaganda that this or that work they contributed to make them worth having them alive?

The premise that if they are not highly pressured to produce something people will just do nothing or only wrong things is such a creepy one.

Universal income or something in that spirit would make far more sense to get rid of this concern of having people not to worry about being able to live, whatever occupation they might chose to pursue on top of that.

The main issue is that the meritocratic narrative is like the opium of the most favored in power imbalance. Information can cure that kind of plague according to literature[1], but there is no insensitive to go on cure when other will pay all the negative effects of our addictions.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/article/77/4/1128/8172634?login...

Why not just consume public-domain IP to begin with? The "Classics" of Western literature used to be viewed as the necessary foundation of a proper education in the humanities; and today you could add "classic" works from other literary traditions (India, China, etc.) for an even more well-rounded approach.

> Ideally, a child could legally provide their own spin on IP they consumed by the time they reach adulthood.

Why though? Do we really need that many more commercial attempts at Star Wars and Harry Potter?

(I do think copyright times are too long, but I do wonder what a "good timescale" would be, and what the benefits and arguments would be.)

We could call it "intellectual feudalism" though academia is competing for that name also.

True, but wouldn't a sliding scale based on commercial success make more sense? How would you measure "worth it" for smaller creators?