What length is necessary to give the author an incentive to create?
Fixed length, of somewhere between 20-40 years. Any longer than that and it has negligible impact on author incentives to create -- which is the only economically-legitimate rationale for offering a government-mandated monopoly (how many authors do you know who would decide whether to sit down to write based on the royalties they might get in 40+ years, let alone the royalties their children might get?).
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