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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)...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.
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. Ending copyright with the author's death will devalue the work of older authors substantially (particularly in the case of movie rights). But it adds a certain amount of risk in any case - no one will want to spend $50-$100 million making a film if the copyright will terminate if the author is in a car wreck.
So life+X protects the authors and gives people who buy the rights from the author (which also helps the author, obviously) some security. Just add a procedure to move orphaned works to the PD faster.
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Blame where blame is due. The Berne convention only calls for Life + 50. All the extensions are from lobbying by large corporate copyright holders, in virtually every nation where copyright is respected. The Rodent House is the most vociferious about extensions.....(and thse same large copyright holders demand that the US not follow Berne when it suits them, hence no public domain day in the US since 1978 (with one year (1922) as an oops exception...)