The world's copyright system is broken.

(It deserves some more vulgar language than "broken", but, y'know, 
that's what it is in the nicest of terms).

Mostly thanks to Disney and other large companies with ancient 
properties and dead creators, litigation about copyright has taken a 
dark turn, and many things that should be dedicated to the public domain 
for the legacy of a work or a creator are instead locked away to be 
completely forgotten. Instead of all works by a creator being open to 
the world 10-20 years after their death, they're instead transferred to 
other rightsholders who will hold them being a paywall for a literal 
lifetime. Unless you live to roughly 150-200 years old (which may be 
very well beyond the capabilities of the human body), you will never be 
able to play with and profit off of a property that you enjoyed that was 
created in your own lifetime. And that's terrible. Fair use is there to 
help, but as shown with companies like Google or Nintendo, it often 
doesn't actually hold up. Legality means nothing when you don't have the 
money to fight a fiscal giant.

I actually had to fight with this issue myself during my work at the 
Welty Lab, where we were digitizing Eudora Welty's works and trying to 
make them available in the digital age, nearly two decades after her 
death. We were very fortunate to be able to work with Eudora Welty's 
niece who did actually own Eudora's copyright, and at least in spoken 
word had permission to publish her works, but there were still so many 
other obstacles. One, Welty's publishers; two, all the other media we 
wanted to use. We were working primarily on a digitization of Powerhouse 
(1941) where we were trying to add in the song references Welty made to 
bring the story to life, more as media than as simply text. Of course, 
despite the fact that all of the songs came out at the *latest* in 1941, 
we would still have to purchase the rights to use them. Hell, we had to 
purchase a license to use the font on the page, which we chose because 
it was the font that was used in the first edition of A Curtain of 
Green which came out in the same year. None of these things come cheap, 
and while there *are* more streamlined ways to get them thanks to the 
internet, the simple fact that these basic elements of pop culture and 
media were hidden behind a paywall 80 years later is insane. A few 
measely megabytes on a hard disk somewhere out there, potentially 
hundreds of dollars and perpetual licensing fees. To this day, the 
website I spent two years working on still is not public for this 
reason. We've got it password protected to save our asses during 
development.

When I eventually die, be it in 300 years or 300 seconds, I want all of 
my work to enter the public domain in at maximum 10 years after my 
death. Sure, if there's some big thing I've got published at the time 
making my survivors a few more dollars to help ease their pain, fine. 
Let it run its course. Then make it free. The world shouldn't have to 
wait another lifetime for things that well could have come out half of 
my lifetime beforehand.

Honestly, I've been thinking about this, and I think it is something 
that is going to permeate its way into how I write licenses for 
commercial software I might ever develop on my own. Most things I 
obviously believe in releasing for free (if not open-sourcing them), but 
of course I have no problem with someone trying to profit a bit on their 
own creativity and hard work (and in fact believe that that's the best 
way to profit period). I think a system where 10 years after the release 
of X version of a piece of software, that version should automatically 
be considered abandonware and enter into the public domain as freeware. 
After all, it wouldn't hurt properties like Microsoft Office for people 
to be able to download Office 2007 or Office 97 for free (and in fact 
properties like those that are now subscription-based anyways wouldn't 
be hurt in the slightest). So long as the rights holders are no longer 
producing actual physical copies of the media for about the same amount 
of time, it should be completely viable for people to reproduce them on their
own.

Not only would this encourage software developers to produce better 
software AND more software, it would also make for a much more 
productive and open community of software developers. Personally I'm 
really interested in producing software for the original Macintosh, but 
I'm worried about Apple cracking down on me if I decide to distribute 
that software on a trimmed down system disk, even though that software 
has been abandonware for decades now. I would be able to sell digital 
version to allow people to simply emulate them if they'd like, but since 
the original Mac ROMs are still protected by copyright and not open 
sourced, I wouldn't be able to legally distribute that and would instead 
tell people "sorry, you've got to find it on your own", opening them up 
to potential malware and simple confusion. I am typing this on a 
Macintosh SE, a computer from 1987, one whose software is still legally 
dubious to obtain in the modern day. Sure, most companies don't actually 
care about abandonware distribution and aren't actively trying to crack 
down on it (nix Nintendo), and in fact companies like Apple very well 
have shown that they are more open by having done things like open 
source Darwin (the BSD base of Mac OS X and onwards), but they still 
have the legal power to do so at any time they wish. Copyright laws, or 
at least licenes, like the one I am proposing, would help tremendously I 
think. Development & developers and consumption & consumers would be 
better off with a far more open idea of copyright, and I hope that 
that's a change I get to see or be a part of in the time that I am 
alive.

C'mon y'all, let's change copyright. Everybody likes free.