[caconym_]

I think copyrights held by individuals on intellectual property they created themselves should expire when they die, maybe with some minimum period of a decade or two to cover cases where royalties etc. could support next of kin. For copyrights held by corporations, or that have otherwise changed hands for money, I'd support a greatly reduced term, maybe on the order of 20 years?

It's strange to think of something like Star Wars being in the public domain, and the effects that might have on our cultural and media landscapes, but if you step back it feels even stranger that something intangible yet so culturally important can be continuously bought and sold and exploited by people who had nothing to do with its creation (almost 50 years ago).

In that sense I probably have a lot of common ground with the "abolish copyright" people, but I feel that most of them are champing at the bit to throw the baby out with the bathwater without having any skin in the game themselves. (sorry for the idiom overload there)

[nearbuy]

Star Wars almost feels a bit like it's public domain already. They've been pretty liberal with licensing their IP so we ended up with a huge number of Star Wars books, comics, games, LEGO sets, merchandise, etc. At the limit, there isn't much practical difference between a public domain work and an IP that will grant anyone a license for a very reasonable fee.

If Star Wars were public domain due to shorter copyright, the newer works and characters would still be protected. Another film studio could make a new movie based off the original trilogy, taking things in a different direction than the new movies. I'm not sure this is likely though, just like no one is rushing to make 3rd party Mickey Mouse cartoons since it entered the public domain. It probably changes things a lot less than copyright proponents worry about.

Even with books, which are much cheaper to produce than movies, the original author would probably capture most of the money from their works under shorter copyright (e.g. 25 year copyright). If you like a series from a particular author, you want new books from that author. You're not going to read A Game of Thrones and then continue with a sequel written by someone else. And as long as the author keeps writing, they're expanding the canonical world in their series with freshly copyrighted IP, and fans will primarily want new works that build on that.

And if an author writes a sequel so bad that fans abandon the series and someone else writes a better sequel that fans flock to... well, the world is better off. Even the original author may be better off if it improves the popularity of the series.