Friends, a great injustice is being wrought by current copyright laws. In countries with life+70 year copyright terms, property that your descendants have every right to is being plucked from their hands by a cruel and uncaring system. Let me paint you a picture to illustrate just the full extent of this horror.
Imagine you're a new parent at 30 years old and you've just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.
But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the "public good", simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they'd just make it worse.
No, it's clear that our current copyright law is inadequate and unfair. We must move to Eternal Copyright – a system where copyright never expires, and a world in which we no longer snatch food out of the mouths of our creators' descendants. With eternal copyright, the knowledge that our great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond will benefit financially from our efforts will no doubt spur us on to achieve greater creative heights than ever seen before.
So friends, I beg you, use whatever clout you have with your local lawmakers, organize rallys and participate in letter writing campaigns, do whatever you must to right this unjust state we exist in!
Much of the above is directly from an editorial by Adrian Hon, which is available here.