I think this strikes a great balance. Creators have a comfy window for financial reward and big firms have less of a stranglehold on culture.
> In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.
The problem with that is the same as with current copyright law. It's easy for lobbyists to get simple changes like changing "10 years" to "70 years". Or resold once to resold twice, because what's good for the economy one time must certainly be double good if we do it twice.
I lean toward making copyright non-transferable. The author keeps it for X years. They are free to license it if someone else can do better at making money from it. The problem with this seems to be group works like movies. Not sure how that would work.
> They are free to license it if someone else can do better at making money from it.
An exclusive sublicensable license is effectively identical to transfer, so there's no meabingful difference between licensable and transferrable (especially the status quo “transferrable, but reclaimable after a set period of years irrespective of the nominal terms of transfer”.)
> The problem with this seems to be group works like movies.
Movies generally don't rely on cooyright transfer, they rely on legal (not merely natural) persons being original copyright holders, and works-for-hire having copyright owned by the hiring party ab initio.
Reselling seems fine if the clock doesn't reset in subsequent sales. You also can't really avoid it since they can have an LLC buy the IP and then just sell the ownership of the LLC.
It seems that the one-time reselling clause can be easily abused by the original IP holder to effectively extend their 20 years to 30 years and enable unlimited reselling? Just sell it to a company you control at the end of 20 years, and you get another 10 years. You can then sell the company to whoever is interested in the IP, and they can also do that, as long as it’s the ownership of the company rather than the IP that’s being transferred technically.
It seems much simpler to just shorten copyright protection. Whether 20 years or 30 years, the world will be a more creative place than it currently is.
> In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.