One of the great deceptions in the discussion about copyrights is its length. With a discount rate of just 4%, a 40 year copyright term would capture 80% of full value of the work. But when we look at the actual works, we see that most are popular for at most a year, maybe 5 years. So granting any longer copyright terms would not help much in generating revenues, and if a work is not popular within 40 years, it will almost never become it later, and it certainly will not provide the income that allows the creator to pursue further works.
The main argument used to justify longer terms is as an old age provision for the artist. Since a work would only generate a meager income 40 years later, it will not help the average artist very much. It would be much better to help them save for their old age. Sportsmen are in the same boat; after 35 they need a new carrier or live of their savings. Artists do not need a special deal.
The real benefactors are the lucky few holders to the rights of evergreens. They still generate a nice income, but we must not forget that the holders would already have been amply rewarded in the first 40 years. There is no need to keep rewarding people for their ideas forever.
The other argument used is brand protection. When you create a popular figure you want to keep the right to exploit it, and you do not want any imitators to produce low quality lookalikes. But this is a job we should not burden copyright law with; there are already frameworks in trademark law that can be used, and we need to make sure that we do not kill fan fiction with it as well. If we look at the successful Disney franchises, they live from renewing their characters, not from reprints of 40+ old stories. And they want to keep the control not for the old stories, but to retain profits and control over marketing tie ins.
The last point is about artistic integrity. But provisions about which versions can be called the real thing are completely separate from who should be allowed to produce them, and royalties.
When we talk about copyright, we should not loose sight that it is an artificial monopoly created by the state to encourage the creation of works. It costs money to police it, and it reduces the ability to interact with them. These are expensive enough that limiting the copyright term to 80% of the value of an infinite monopoly sounds like a brilliant deal. This is a 40 year term when assuming a 4% discount rate, an incredibly generous assumption. For example companies demand a discount rate of 8% to 12% when calculating whether to start a product, because of the inherent uncertainty in any projection of the future. Nobody uses the returns 40 years from now when calculating where to invest, the uncertainty is just too great. The terms are so long not because they would encourage more creative works, they are the result of lobbying by the lucky few millionaires and companies owning the few really profitable properties and wanting to extract extra rent from the public. Long copyrights are not for needy poor artists, they are for greedy rich bastards.
