[kelnos]

I think for smaller creators, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. While writing a song or story doesn't require much equipment cost, it does take a lot of time and effort, and that's time and effort that would be impossible to justify if the returns don't at least pay for food and housing.

But for big business media, it feels like the usual justification that rightsholders use for aggressive enforcement is that if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore. Which is technically true, but I don't think we've ever seen infringement on a level that would make these sorts of creations financially infeasible to make.

Actually, going back to small creators: it's not like current copyright terms are reasonable, anyway. I mean, let's say it takes you a year of full-time work to write a novel and get it published. So you could say that's a year of "lost" wages. Maybe copyright terms should be floating. As soon as the author recoups the "lost wages" plus some percent for creation-related expenses and profit, then it goes into the public domain. Why should creators (and often their descendants) get to milk their work for decades? I get that something like this would be a nightmare to handle legally, so maybe it makes sense to set a shorter copyright term based on some sort of average time to break even (or perhaps say 30th percentile or whatever, to make it more inclusive of some works that take longer). That's still difficult; I imagine you'd have to have different terms for different types of work. But it might be a lot more fair to the public commons.

Regardless, current terms for copyright are ridiculous: 95 years after publication, or 75 years after the death of the creator. I mean... what? That's nuts. Before Disney and Sonny Bono got greedy about all this, max term was less than 30 years, which sounds a lot more reasonable... though IMO still high! If the cost to create has gone down over time -- which for many types of creations I believe it has -- then copyright terms should be adjusted downward, not upward!

[hypertele-Xii]

> if too many people "steal", then there won't be enough revenue to even break even, let alone make a profit, and so no one will make movies anymore

At current budgets. To make a movie all you need is a camera, and we pretty much all got one in our pockets at this point.

Someone will make movies sans copyright. It just won't be a massive, entrenched studio on a billion budget.

[kelnos]

Sure. To be clear, I'm not saying I buy the movie studios' rationale here; I'm merely pointing out what they often say.

I think a question we should also ask, though, is: is there artistic and entertainment value in massive-budget blockbuster films? I think yes, there is. I mean, I certainly enjoy plenty of them. But is that worth our current copyright regime? I would say no. But, like anything else, I expect the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. I don't think I would advocate for no copyright at all, but I would want it to be much more limited than it is now (even more limited than in the 90s, with 14+14-year terms, I'd say).