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there were tons of people -- many of whom were lifelong Democrats -- claiming that they would switch parties if the GOP stuck with this
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For purely selfish reasons, I'm all for reducing the length of copyright to the proposed 46 years. However, there are far more important issues for me to base my vote on.
Actually, if you remove all the blather about the founding fathers and DJ's, the GOP proposal sounds pretty good to me as a reader. If the penalties for copyright infringement were less draconian, they might be slightly more enforceable. And 36 or 46 years is probably a long enough copyright period to not to significantly harm incentives for creating expensive-to-research new non-fiction books.
If there could be an exemption for classical music, I would favor that. I think that putting lots of CD quality classical music in the public domain, just a few years from now, would hurt that already ailing music sector.
The renewal fees do sound a lot like new taxes. Grover Norquist wouldn't have liked that.
P.S. We shouldn't violate the Berne Convention (life plus 50) unilaterally, but only as part of international negotiations. Step one should be to harmonize with Canada. The GOP proposal was irresponsible because of ignoring international law.