[graemep]

The middle ground could be a lot of different things. One might be a reformed copyright system.

The economist I know of who calculated a socially optimal copyright duration, Rufus Pollock, came up with an estimate of 20 something years.

This makes sense from the point of view of finance because the NPV of extra years beyond this is very low. To put it in qualitative terms, no one is thinking about their grandchildren's pensions when they decide to create a work.

Personally I would also have different durations and rules for different types of work: a book, a video, and a piece of software are very different works and need diffferent incentives