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As always, copyright is a supressor of creativity, not an enabler. Copyright terms should be 10-20 years max, or up to death of an author. Even current regime is ridiculous.
I don't think Taylor Swift became a billionaire on copyrights of her songs - it was because she did very successful concerts performing them.

CDs and streaming are just advertisements for the concerts.

I would argue that in a digital world, copyright should be inversely scalable to the size of the creator - that is, individual works by independent artists intended for exhibition rather than reproduction should receive more favorable terms than movies or games created by huge conglomerates intended for mass reproduction, licensing, and sale.

Or more simply: if you’re not selling it presently, you don’t get copyright on it. There, abandonware and lost media rights are solved, and we can all move on.

This my fundamental problem with some of the propositions on this topic here.

I fundamentally disagree to only for one example in a thread here have a copyright of 5 years for a Book Author. Many book authors could never finish their series without their first books becoming public domain or so.

On the other hand Everything created by corporations i.e. where a corporation not a single human holds a copyright can get fucked.

Just to try to understand this, do you think anyone should be able to make, say, a Harry Potter movie right now paying nothing to the author?
Copyright for nearly everything but software, is primarily a question of "can I reproduce this other person's creative work?". Fair use doctrine is so broad that I think it most everything else falls under most people's accepted "artists deserve to be compensated for their work" gut instinct.

If you're going to save money by not coming up with an original idea for a movie, or video game, or whatever, and then use the public goodwill produced by an existing work to market it, it seems perfectly just that the original creator gets a cut of that action.

It's always funny seeing these threads, when it's about AI these people defend copyright to the death. Then when it's about a private IP owner holding onto their IP, it's "death to copyright"
Or maybe we have never needed an exclusive economic monopoly on a creative work to encourage the creation of art? Maybe we would all be in a better world were art and culture lived in the collective commons, free for anyone in the zeitgeist to adapt and proliferate? Can we really say commercial production of culture has been truly the best for society?
Fair point but not a very realistic outset. I think changing Copyright to be more fair is realistic. Removing Copyright entirely very unlikely.
That's pretty hypothetical. Do you not like music, movies and other art? Which art do you like? Which art do you think you'd see more of if there was no copyright?
Uh, how are you creative when you make a copy of Mondrian's work?

I can understand some of the arguments for a time limit on copyright, but are you really claiming that you're being "creative" when you cut and paste?

I read "The duration of the U.S. protection for all other works… was for 70 years from the artist’s date of death" and thought wow, did Mondrian really live into the 1960s or so?

Next paragraph: "Mondrian died in 1944. Any of his works subject to a life-plus-70 regime would have entered the public domain" 10 years ago. Who even thought of including that in a legal argument??

The Mondrian estate... don't get me started on that one.
Please do get started! You can't just leave hints like that and not give us the full scoop!
Copyright doing what it does best. Killing new works that resemble a bit too much anything under its protection and allowing rentseekers to live off others.
That's because you're ignoring the primary purpose of copyright, which works perfectly and is invisible because violating it so obviously stupid (because the rules exist): I, an author, go to a print shop and say "I'd like 500 copies of my book, please", and then print shop sells me my 500 copies, then prints 1000 more and sells them themselves.

Copyright is primarily concerned with one-to-one recreations of existing works. That is the primary reason for copyright's existence. All the other stuff is built out of trying to close stupid loopholes that people would try exploit.

We GIVE creators copyright to serve us by encouraging CREATION.

Mondrian died decades ago. He is not creating any more. Copyright of his works is not serving us any more.

Copyright should have ended when the balance between encouraging his creation and encouraging others to create based on his works was reached. i.e. About 5 years after he made the piece.

Fuck the copyright parasites whining about this.

Reminds me of when in my youth I thought it would be a good idea to re-tile my bathroom in the style of a Mondrian. This because I'd found that white, red, green and yellow tiles were available at low cost. Good to know that bathroom is not in breach of copyright now.
If I were to sell an app on the App Store called Mondrianify which made Mondrian-style pictures, would the Mondrian Trust demand the app be removed?
Germany didn't have patent laws in the 1800s. Their economy rapidly industrialized and boomed.

I don't believe on balance that patents would be a net improvement. Are companies really going to stop making things better if they couldn't patent it?

Note that Tesla open sources its patents.