[inglor_cz]

Not the OP, but if general copyright lasted for 20 years and you had to pay (even a small) fee for prolonging it after that period, the public domain would expand massively and abandonware + orphaned works would stop being a thing.

And the very few lucrative works would still be protected, because their copyright holders would pay the fee.

The tragedy of current copyright is that there is an enormous mass of copyrighted works that is a) commercially useless or nearly useless, but b) still copyrighted, so other people cannot build on them.

[kranke155]

40 years copyright sounds about right to me, half the average human lifetime and certainly most of one’s highly productive lifetime.