Ask Lemmy

For an independent artist in the US, I think their lifetime +25 years & 9 months.

It's something they made, they created it, they deserve to profit off of it.

Why the +25 years & 9 months?

Independent artists may not have a more traditional retirement plan with a pension/401k, health benefits, etc. They work for themselves, their income can be inconsistent, sometimes their work may not become popular until years later or even after they pass away.

But that work is how they're providing for their family, their children's care and college funds and such, funeral expenses, help their spouses along after they pass, etc.

In the US you can usually stay on your parents healthcare up until 26, so I think it's fair that we should allow their family to profit off that copyright for that long after their death.

If I were an artist, and immediately after getting my wife pregnant, keeled over dead, I'd want to know that I've left behind something that will help them along at least a bit hopefully at least until my kid is hopefully old enough to stand on their own since.

And sure, not every artist is going to be leaving behind a pregnant wife, but most people are going to have some sort of family who are going to be stuck with funeral expenses and other legal bullshit to sort out, and I think that 25ish years is a reasonable enough timeframe to keep the copyright tied up before releasing it to the public domain.

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For works created by/for a company (or owned by one if an individual creator sold it to them,) I think it can get a little murkier.

A lot of people cite the old 14 years + one 14 year extension that was the original US copyright law. And I get it, that sounds reasonable enough I guess.

But a lot of things have changed since then, companies are bigger, things like video games exist now that didn't back then, and some things have gotten a lot more complex.

Let's look at the MCU, just the main movies have come out over 18 years and is still going for the foreseeable future, and with spider man and Deadpool sort of tying in some of the pre-MCU movies into the shared multiverse, you can even argue that it's 26 years at this point. Hell, Marvel and DC have been doing their thing since the 30s. New Star Trek stuff has been trickling out since the 60s. Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong 45 years ago. Skyrim came out in 2011, and the next elder scrolls game is still probably years away. We just didn't have franchises like we do now back in 1790, I think it's fair that the laws should reflect in some way how long-lived some franchises can last now.

I think it might be fair at this point to allow a company to hold copyright on something indefinitely (please put away your torches and pitchforks) but

1. They need to renew the copyright every 5 years. If they don't it automatically enters the public domain.
2. In order to renew it they must make that copyrighted property available to the average person. If I can't go out and buy a copy of a specific movie, game, book, etc. then they don't get to sit on the copyright for it.
3. After maybe 50 years (I'm flexible on that, but 50 is a nice, round number,) as long as they've kept up with the renewals, they still own it, and other people/companies have to pay them to use it for commercial purposes, but they no longer control it, after that point they can no longer deny anyone the right to use that media as long as they're paid for it, and they don't get to set the price, that becomes a fixed rate set by the government. A 50+ year old movie (or whatever) costs $X if you want to make and sell copies of it, $Y to create and sell merchandise based on it, $Z to show it in a theater, etc. and those prices will be kept reasonable.
4. Also, after 50 years, non-commercial use opens up. You can use it to your heart's content however you want, copying it, sharing it, posting it online, whatever you want, as long as you're not making a profit on it.

Bridging parts 4 and 5. Let's say you wanted to post a whole movie on YouTube. If your channel isn't monetized you're totally in the clear, you can do that. However YouTube might still make a profit off of it being there due to ads and such. So YouTube can either

A. Not allow copyrighted material in their TOS, and must take it down when (and only when) requested by the copyright holder.
Or
B. Choose to pay the appropriate licensing fee to stream that copyrighted material, which again would be a fixed, reasonably low rate set by the government. It might be worth it to them to pay that fee because it means increased traffic to their site.

If your channel is monetized, you would have to pay that fee. Again, these fees are going to be fixed and kept fairly low. What those fees are is probably going to depend on how it's used. Using, let's say, a clip that's 30 seconds or less of something in another video might be a one time fee of $5, but if you're posting the whole movie, maybe that deserves some percentage of what you earn from those views unless YouTube decides to pay for the streaming license for that movie (if you then owe anything to YouTube for that and how much would be part of whatever monetization agreement you have with YouTube)

Deciding exactly what those licensing fees for 50+ year old media should be is well outside of my pay-grade.

EDIT: There's a lot more to intellectual property than just copyright, trademarks, patents, etc. so this is really only scraping the surface, but hopefully this kind of shows where my head is at with these kinds of matters.