14 years was considered good enough back when it was prohibitively expensive to publish anything and worldwide distribution was basically impossible. Today, when publishing is essentially free and worldwide distribution happens at close to light speed you think we should expand copyright for another year?
I lean more towards 7-10 years, with required registration involving a DRM free copy of the work submitted to the US copyright office (where possible) who will automatically host that file for free once the copyright term has expired. There should be an RSS feed from copyright.gov with download links to the latest works entering the public domain. That'd also make it dead simple to find who you need to contact if you want to negotiate rights to use a work still under copyright's protection.
I agree that anything getting public funding should be public domain on day one (normal exceptions for national security etc)
I lean more towards 7-10 years, with required registration involving a DRM free copy of the work submitted to the US copyright office (where possible) who will automatically host that file for free once the copyright term has expired. There should be an RSS feed from copyright.gov with download links to the latest works entering the public domain. That'd also make it dead simple to find who you need to contact if you want to negotiate rights to use a work still under copyright's protection.
I agree that anything getting public funding should be public domain on day one (normal exceptions for national security etc)