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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span--it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we'd be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.
5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.
Exactly! That's what we had originally in the US, and I thought that was more than fair. I would add that the renewal should only be awarded if they can prove they need more time to recoup R&D costs and it's still available commercially.
So yeah, something in the neighborhood of 10-15 years w/ a renewal sounds totally fair to me. Let them keep the trademarks and whatnot as long as they're in use (e.g. you shouldn't be able to make a new entry in a series w/o the author's permission for the marks, but fanfic that explicitly mentions it's not original/canon would probably fall under fair use), but the actual copyright should expire very quickly.