It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).
Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.
There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday April 24 2015, @03:32PM
The Telegraph article is interesting to read, and what's even better is they ask a spokesman for the Green Party to clarify, and this spokesman referred back to a fascinating scientific (well, economic anyway, it's debatable whether economy is a science) article from 2007:
http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years/ [arstechnica.com]
This referred to an article by the Cambridge economist Rufus Pollock who had *calculated* that the optimum copyright duration for society is in fact 14 years.
So now here we are 8 years later, and copyright duration in the EU is still "70 years post mortem auctoris", and I wonder: does anyone know if this calculation has ever been refuted / challenged / delegated to the dustbin of history / ridiculed?
Because *if not*, then the current scientific consensus on optimum copyright length, is in fact still that 14 years from Pollock. And it will stay 14 years, until somebody can convince us with a better model calculation that it should be a different number, or the same number but a different methodology.