[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I do like life +50 better than life +70 (although I wish people would stop blaming that on Disney and start blaming it on Berne)

50 is Berne. 70 is Disney. 95 years for corporate works is definitely Disney.

I'd *love* to see the US decide to retroactively limit copyright to the Berne convention minimums, and throw everything registered by a corporation before 1960 into the public domain, deal with Life+50 for personally-authored works.

Expect an increasing number of bizarre copyright law attempts as Steamboat Willy gets closer to the public domain, but congressfolks are also being barraged by the problem of orphan works, so "just add another 25 years" no longer seems like a reasonable reaction to their increasingly-vocal net-savvy constituents.

...but I would like for there to be a provision allowing orphaned works to come off of copyright much sooner...maybe there is a $500 relicensing fee every 20 years or something.

One proposal that was rejected was a $20 relicensing fee. Because it would be TOO HARD for copyright owners to be required to do ANYTHING to claim their rights.

But in general, I think that a life + X formulation is the best way of fixing a copyright date. A straightforward term of years could lead to a situation where the author is still alive and loses his rights to a body of work he might still be working on...or planning on working on.

So? We managed to produce books, movies, songs and artwork for hundreds of years on that system.

Publication + 25 years; extend another 25 for a hefty fee. Unpublished works: Life+25, or publication+25 if published posthumously.

Of course, one of the big problems that mainstream media companies haven't touched is "what is publication?"... 50 years ago, that was simple. Now, not so much. Is a locked blog post published? A private email cc'd to 10 people? Code written for a website that's members-only and has no membership? (Company dissolved before it got started, perhaps.) Office memos pinned to corkboards?