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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
I partly agree, in that to me life + 50 is ideal.
However, any renewal term will increase the costs and complexities for artists, publishers, and government agencies alike.
In terms of the examples, I think you're missing the extremity of Elfwreck's $2000 registration. It would likely bankrupt creative professionals who try to keep up. How does what amounts to a "Copyright Tax" actually encourage people to create?
There is no question in my mind that automatic copyright is beneficial for and helps promote the arts, and that registration just makes it harder to do the work.
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A 2000 dollar tax would be excessive, but your reasoning that a tax would discourage creative activity is not sound. How does allowing an artist to profit from works created twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years later encourage creative production? If anything, allowing their works to fall into the public domain compels them to keep creating throughout their lifetime. I am not saying this is right or wrong. If you want to argue that an artist deserves to profit off their creations for their lifetimes for moral reasons or for some property principle, that is fine. But it does not follow that a registration fee many many years after a work has already been created discourages creativity.
What I think would be really helpful is if more people were educated about copyright. I would guess that most people believe copyright is something you have to register with the government, and not something that is automatic. This in itself poses many problems. Most of what is created is not created for commercial purposes, and a lot of content creators, especially scholars, would not mind if their works were freely distributed. The problem is that if they do not indicate that it is okay to distribute their works, most people will either not bother with them, or figure it is too much of a hassle to contact the creator. So in effect this aspect of Copyright discourages the dissemination of knowledge. I think Creative Commons Licenses offers a decent solution to this problem(albeit it still has its flaws), but more people need to be aware of this. However, I think the Creative Commons only works well for books. Photographs are a whole different issue with its own set of problems.