[matheusmoreira]

It's not off-target. Copyright terms have nothing to do with the author. If we wanted to maximize author benefit, we'd just make it infinite.

Copyright term duration is about society. The truth is copyright is bullshit. Artificial scarcity is exactly that: artificial. It's a lie. Society is doing creators a huge favor: we're all pretending the creator's works are scarce. We're pretending we don't know how to make copies. We do this so that they can make money from their work. And we're doing it with the understanding that after a while the work will belong to us all. It will no longer be the creator's, it will become part of our culture by joining the public domain. Public property.

The longer you make those terms, the more unfair it is to the society that enabled the creator's business in the first place. The more unfair it is, the less reason there is to uphold the original social contract.

This arrangement must be tolerable for society. This eternal rent-seeking monopoly bullshit will not be tolerated. One day society is going to stop pretending and these monopolists will understand that everything is public domain.

It's already happening. See Sci-Hub.

[exporectomy]

Just because it's artificial scarcity doesn't mean it's not useful. Money also has artificial scarcity and that's a pretty good invention.

My point is that copyright is to incentivize authors to produce work but if it's limited by the author's lifetime, then older people will be incentivized less than younger people because they won't be able to sell the rights for as much money because they'll expire sooner. We don't particularly need work created by young people more than old people, so why incentivize it that way?

[matheusmoreira]

My point is copyright duration should never have grown beyond 5-10 years to begin with. I'm not saying copyright should expire if the person dies.

> Money also has artificial scarcity

I don't understand. Why do you think that?

[exporectomy]

You can create your own notes and coins but it's illegal because they want to maintain the artificial scarcity. The whole idea of fiat currency depends on people trusting that artificial scarcity will be maintained by the government.

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah, government currency does have those problems. I'm not sure I'd even classify it as real money to begin with, it's just a scheme governments impose on their populations. Real money is precious metals: naturally scarce, malleable, fungible, divisible, universally recognized as valuable. A very small set of cryptocurrencies also have a shot at becoming real money one day.

I don't think this can be called artificial scarcity though. It's real scarcity that's gradually inflated away by governments and banks. Data is already infinitely abundant as soon as it's created.

[exporectomy]

Have you somehow modelled how the global economy would change if copyright was 10 years and fiat currency didn't exist and people used gold instead? Without that, you're living in fantasy land. You can make any idea seem better if you just make up the consequences in a way that favors your idea.