[zekevermillion]

I generally agree. But I do have some doubts as to how copyleft licensing would work without copyright protection. We can't enforce free licensing of contributions to GPL works, for example, without having the copyright in the first place.

I don't think it is ideal to protect copyrights for such a lengthy term. But simply reducing copyright terms to a shorter one, like 7 years, could be problematic -- unless we simultaneously enact a new legal obligation to make software works derived from free software available to the public under similarly free terms.

[pbhjpbhj]

Not the OP but will a company wait 7 years so they can use some (F)OSS without providing their source modifications?

Seems unlikely, but if they do and those modifications are super-helpful then at most you'd have to wait 7 years to use reverse-engineered versions (disregarding patents), more likely you could reverse-engineer the mods and write technical equivalents using fresh code (ie clean-room re-writes).

Seems to me like it would still work in practice.