Replying to Avatar Cory Doctorow

This would be pretty good industrial policy - almost no works are commercially viable after just 14 years:

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf

But there are massive structural barriers to realizing such a policy, the biggest being that the US had tied its own hands by insisting that long copyright terms be required in the trade deals it imposed on other countries, thereby binding itself to these farcically long copyright terms.

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But there is *another* policy lever American creators can and should yank on to partially resolve this: #Termination. The #1976CopyrightAct established the right for any creator to "terminate" the "transfer" of any copyrighted work after 30 years, by filing papers with the @CopyrightOffice. This process is unduly onerous, and the @AuthorsAlliance (where I'm a volunteer advisor) has created a tool to simplify it:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/rights-reversion-portal/

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Termination is deliberately obscure, but it's incredibly powerful. The copyright scholar @RGibli has studied this extensively, helping to produce the most complete report on how termination has been used by creators of all types:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avoidance-is-evasion/#reverted

Writers, musicians and other artists have used termination to unilaterally cancel the crummy deals they had crammed down their throats 30 years ago.

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