[anigbrowl]

when you share an idea and the public adopts it into their culture, it is no longer the author's thing

Yes it is, and one of the major failings of US copyright law is that it doesn't require the original author to be acknowledged.

a successful copyright holder will be provided ample money for several lifetimes

Most copyright holders don't enjoy anything like that degree of financial reward. You're basing your entire argument on the tiny percentage of artists that make it big and get very rich. What about the much larger percentage that just scrape by, or who don't enjoy any success for years before enjoying modest success? This is a far more common pattern in the arts.

[cookiecaper]

>Yes it is, and one of the major failings of US copyright law is that it doesn't require the original author to be acknowledged.

This position does not make any sense to me at all. If you think something up, you deserve some credit, but all the thought and investment that others put in using that concept as a base or jumping off point is surely more extensive if you get any significant recognition. Why is the single concept of the author greater than anything it's capable of spawning? Why shouldn't those greater ideas be allowed to propagate and flow organically? Why is the author entitled to constant, perpetual control and flow over this work which they chose to publish publicly, aware of the human impulse to remix, experiment, and learn freely without artificial limitation? Giving the author a fair head start is great, but we need to be careful not to make the system too unnatural and one-sided here.

>What about the much larger percentage that just scrape by, or who don't enjoy any success for years before enjoying modest success? This is a far more common pattern in the arts.

What about them? If there is no demand for their work, a copyright won't do them much good. In fact, if their work enters the public domain it may get additional exposure, which in the long run may be more beneficial to their career than keeping each piece under lock and key for 100+ years from the date of publication.

[abruzzi]

Actually there are plenty of artists whose livelihood isn't about appealing to 100 million people and making fat cash. They release one work, and the 1000 or 10000 fans earn them $100 a month on that work. Then another work earns them another $100 a month. Eventually, after 20 years of carrying a day job to support their art, they're bringing in enough residuals that they can quit the day job and spend more time doing what they want to do.

These people are the long tail of the art/music/cinema worlds, and destroying their mechanism of compensation will make for a poorer world. Lifetime of author+0 is perfect. Protecting income sources for the children on the author doesn't encourage new art.

[cookiecaper]

The original author will continue to be allowed to make money -- they will just no longer have a monopoly on doing so. The cold hard facts are that if you're not able to make something profitable within five years from its publication, you're not providing a service that the market finds adequately valuable. Do we keep startups with 1000 or 10,000 users/fans around to flounder until the proprietor has made enough startups that the small monthly residuals compound to a livable income?

Copyright is a gift which the public offers to encourage useful, meaningful art. To give it an extra, unnatural profit incentive at the expense of free culture, collaboration, and idea proliferation. We should be very careful re: how much of this we're willing to give away. Right now, we give entirely too much.

[anigbrowl]

The original author will continue to be allowed to make money -- they will just no longer have a monopoly on doing so.

Tee hee, good luck with that business model.

The cold hard facts are that if you're not able to make something profitable within five years from its publication, you're not providing a service that the market finds adequately valuable.

And we all know that the market (especially in the arts) is always right, because no successful work has ever languished in obscurity for years before finding an audience, right?

Er, wrong. In the film industry, establishing your ownership of a screenplay means registering with the Writer's Guild of America and/or the Library of Congress copyright registrar - many production companies won't even look at an unregistered script because of the potential for costly litigation if a dispute arises over authorship. But it's quite common for scripts to bounce around Hollywood for a long time before getting turned into a movie, often over a decade. This is referred to in the industry as 'development hell' because it's frustrating and financially draining for everyone involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell

I'm pretty sure that similar problems exist in the music industry, the art world and so on. There's a truism that being an overnight success in the entertainment business takes at least 10 years, but under your proposal the copyright holder that finally makes it after years of trying is likely to find that they don't have any saleable rights in their prior work any more.