alt Hacker NewsWhy not just 30 years? Patents get a flat 20.
Not that I'm arguing for 30 per se, just that I don't see what goals of copyright would be advanced more by adding an "or until death" complication.
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For inventions if you don't make money off it in the first 20 years you are unlikely to ever make any money off it - as the invention space moves on.
That's not the same for a work of fiction or a piece of music. Case in point apparently books sales for the Odyssey are massively up - when it was originally written in 7-8 BC :-)
Also most books etc don't make much, if any money - an publisher/author might rely on a the cummulative effect of a number of revenue streams built over time.
Also the effect of exclusivity is different - for patents you are potentially blocking the area of innovation you have patented by your exclusivity.
That's not the same societal effect as somebody not being able to copy mickey mouse.
So they aren't exactly the same - however I'm not proposing a 3000 year copyright :-)
Well imagine you write a book in your 20s or 30s and it only becomes popular after a couple of decades. The publisher gets to pocket all the money.
Somebody decides to make a movie based on your book? You get nothing at all from it... The movie bit would be problematic even for books that were reasonably popular at the time. e.g the Witcher adaption came out almost exactly 20 years after the last book, for GOT it wasn't that far from being the case as well (at least for the initial volumes). Studios would be incentivized just to wait a couple of years to avoid paying anything.
I think it could be reasonably to have a fixed limit if the rights are held by corporations, though.