[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Greg Anos

How about instead of life + 50, make it the actuarial lifespan of the author + 50.

Actuarial lifespan = the average life span of people at the age of the author at the time of publication. Life insurance use this number all the time for policy calculations.

Example. Author X publishes a book at age 40. The actuarial life span of 40 year olds at that time is (say) 80 years. Copyright is then 80-40 = 40 years + 50 years, even if the author dies the next year.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Too complicated and too inaccurate. My father is 95 and will be 96 in December. My mother lived to be 89. So saying 80 is inaccurate. Also, in your example, the copyright will last 90 years instead of 50.

life+50 is a known quantity.

The problem I see with using "life" as one of the factors is that it requires having to track when someone passed away in order to determine copyright when the copyright expires, which might be difficult in some cases. With what I proposed (100 full years from date of initial release), it could be easily determined via a statement of initial release in the book's Copyright Page. It could be something like "This book was initially released in 2020."

Something I hadn't thought of when I initially posted on this topic is that it it would also make it easy to determine copyright for non-book publications, like newspapers and magazines. With this rule, if a magazine/newspaper was released in 1946 the entire newspaper/magazine would go into the public domain on 1 January 2048. Making death of the writer a factor in determining copyright would create the situation where some parts of a magazine/newspaper are in copyright while other parts are not.