Entertainment

It’s more that so much IP is locked up behind very risk-averse megacorps, set the copyright term to 30 years (enough to profit from the initial hype and a nostalgia cycle) and it’s in the public domain without exception then we’ll suddenly see a much richer popular culture. People like to think Disney and other huge firms are creators but I’d liken them more to hoarders or the sort of people who buy restorable classic cars only to carelessly let them rot away into a puddle of rust.

If I was a dictator of a country IP reform would be quite near the top of my agenda, only an arrant philistine would argue for corporate control of Shakespeare or the Iliad in my opinion yet we think so lowly of our modern culture such greedy and disrespectful hands are allowed to monopolise it. By all means let creators profit from their creations for a while after they’re invented but what we’ve got today is an obscenity.

A less extreme version of this would be a ‘shit or get off the pot’ law that either forces an auction or better yet returns IP to the public domain that’s not been used over the last x years in a meaningful way.