That's a bit inflexible. Some authors spend their entire adult lives writing a single series of books - yanking copyright out from under them just isn't fair. The same is true of movie franchises, comics, and almost any kind of media that gets released over time.
I've spent some time considering the issue and have come to the conclusion that the truly broken part of copyright is that it provides no incentive to release unprofitable works to the public domain.
What I'd like to see is a system where maintaining copyright costs the copyright owners at an increasing rate. For example, set a term for copyright (say 5 years) and set the cost of registering copyright to 10^n, where n is the number of times you've registered the copyright before. Initial registration costs $1, years 6-10 cost $10, years 11-15 cost $100, and so on.
A system like this would benefit small creators (they'd have time to make a profit before renewal became cost prohibitive) and encourage companies like Disney to release works that aren't profitable anymore.
I'd also recommend using the money from this system to fund a digital archive run by the library of congress. You would need to provide a complete copy of the copyrighted work in order to receive a copyright. Any works that enter the public domain would be made available for, say, five years. That way, we wouldn't lose old works that are entering public domain but no copies exist anymore.
Obviously, there's all kinds of issues with a system like that and it would need to be fleshed out and clarified, but I think it'd be a good starting point.
I've spent some time considering the issue and have come to the conclusion that the truly broken part of copyright is that it provides no incentive to release unprofitable works to the public domain.
What I'd like to see is a system where maintaining copyright costs the copyright owners at an increasing rate. For example, set a term for copyright (say 5 years) and set the cost of registering copyright to 10^n, where n is the number of times you've registered the copyright before. Initial registration costs $1, years 6-10 cost $10, years 11-15 cost $100, and so on.
A system like this would benefit small creators (they'd have time to make a profit before renewal became cost prohibitive) and encourage companies like Disney to release works that aren't profitable anymore.
I'd also recommend using the money from this system to fund a digital archive run by the library of congress. You would need to provide a complete copy of the copyrighted work in order to receive a copyright. Any works that enter the public domain would be made available for, say, five years. That way, we wouldn't lose old works that are entering public domain but no copies exist anymore.
Obviously, there's all kinds of issues with a system like that and it would need to be fleshed out and clarified, but I think it'd be a good starting point.