[pdurrant]

I would like to argue against basing copyright on the lifetime of the author.

Why should some works obtain a longer copyright than other works? Why should two works published in the same year have different copyright lengths? Is there any benefit to society that this should be so?

Could it be that we're awarding longer copyright to the best of an author's output? This seems unlikely. An author's first works are rarely their best. Why give juvenilia twenty or thirty years more protection than the work an author produces in their prime?

Why add this uncertainty to copyright? The vast majority of works make all the commercial success they're going to make in the first year. A few make money for a decade. A very rare few continue to make money for decades. Surely 50 years is a long enough time to make money from a work, before it's released to the public domain so that others can create new works without worries about possible infringement of something they read decades ago.

I have long felt that lifetime + a term a years was a nonsense. I now feel that any use of lifetime in copyright length calculations is foolish, and we should go to a simple time from publication.