The current term in the US is like life +70 years, or something.

While 10 is arbitrary, I like it because it is much closer to balancing incentive for creativity vs stifling creativity.

I make software and data. It’s worth protecting. But I think the harm from copyright protection has been greater than the benefit.

Framing it as people who want reasonable copyright as anti-creator is so not cool and avoids discussion.

> If you made anything that was worth protecting you might feel differently.

How do you know they didn't? Oh, because of the No True Scotsman of "no person who truly made something worth protecting can have this opinion".

As if none of us have released anything under an MIT license. Ridiculous.

It was originally 14 years back in 1790 when publishing anything was expensive, distribution was difficult, and worldwide distribution was nearly impossible. Today you can publish works across the globe at close to the speed of light and at very little cost. 10 years seems pretty damn reasonable.

The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works and allowing people creative access to their own culture accomplishes that goal a whole lot better than protecting the profits of corporations for ~100 years.

Why do we send X person to prison for 5 years, and not 4 years, or 6 years? Clearly the only rational choices are life sentence or no prison time.

Or, why protect it for 70 years? Why not 69 years? Why not 68 years? etc. Such a useless argument in every way.

Copyright is an artificial monopoly set in place to guarantee that artists get a piece of the cake from distributors. The duration of this monopoly is completely arbitrary, and ideally it should be "long enough to make art creation a viable trade".

I'd expect most people in this forum have made something "worth protecting" or even make a living doing so. Certainly it's been my career. I still think we should drastically shorten copyrights and expect more to grant it. e.g. for software, require source escrow to the copyright office and probably require source availability to purchasers, and ban things like hardware that only runs signed software. Basically the law should be GPL without redistribution, but where you could hire a programmer to fix things for you and maybe share your diff. Or just straight GPL (i.e. software should not be eligible for copyright as it's a functional thing, not a creative thing, and consumer protection law should make it mandatory to provide source and a way to load your own version for any device that has it). For other works, registration fees should cover storage of a master copy until expiration + N years so it can be released to the public. Maybe "source material" there as well wherever it makes sense. I understand that might make my career less lucrative. That's fine.

Whoever drafts the law has to arbitrarily choose a number, or there will be no end of litigation to settle it, and a judge will arbitrarily choose a number. OP's opinion is "not more than 10" so 9, 8 and 1 would all be fine with them, while 11 would be too long. Source: reading. Meanwhile you haven't even made clear where you stand on the issue or what point you're making or in what way "differently" OP is supposed to feel.

I think I've made plenty and I don't feel differently.

You could ask the same questions about the actual duration of copyrights as they are today. You present those rhetorical questions as if they were some argument against this proposal, but they're just things you need to think about regardless of what scheme you come up with: why this, and why not something else? It's not like "life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years from first publication, or 120 years from creation" is any less arbitrary.

We should remember that the purpose of intellectual property laws in the US is explicitly, per the US Constitution, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...." The purpose is not to ensure that creators can keep collecting money decades after they created their works. It may be useful to ensure that as a way to promote progress, but it's just a tool, not the goal. If progress is better promoted with a 10-minute copyright term then we should do that instead.

> If you made anything that was worth protecting you might feel differently.

Please don't put those of us who create so-called 'intellectual property' for a living in the middle of this.

We didn't ask for government protection and we don't want it.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLbqgG6o1n8

Because it sounds like a nice round reasonable number. Like many others in the law.

Now stop being a clown.