It secures the benefits of copyright for work being produced by the creator up to death, for their heirs and dependents, which is why they were creating for money in the first place. People don’t just die after twenty years of resting on their laurels; everyone is creating copyrighted work. It’s a key part of the incentive to create lasting works of value.
One can make the case that this period should be more limited, or that the combination should be capped, but life+X is the right formulation, I think.
Why can't they do what the rest of us do? Earn and save money during your working life and leave _that_ for your heirs. Let copyright die with the author.
Work is often only recently published when an artist or author dies but has taken years of non-earning to create.
I know this them-and-us thinking is fashionable in the tech world but the reality is that the majority of creative people don’t earn much and never have, and copyright was developed not to give them extra power over the rest of us but to create a framework for creative work to earn them an income at all.
Sure, some number of years is reasonable - but what do you think that is? Because 70 is insane. A single bestseller should not be able to support an extended family over three generations; at some point the rent-seeking becomes excessive. If you publish a work, at some point it stops being yours. The fact that this takes a whole lifetime is already very generous.
I don't disagree; personally I think you could go with life plus 35 and cap the whole thing at 80 years from publication.
But I do think some potential post-mortem protection is essential for creative work to remain viable, and that means that any post-mortem buyer of an artist's estate has to be able to get value from recent work for a period of time.
This whole discussion is somewhat fantastical now anyway, because copyright is fucked.
But the intent was always to make working artists' lives possible; the various copyright extensions have always been for the benefit of corporate copyright holders, and it is unfair to vilify individual working artists for that.
It was only narrowed for the purposes of the point I am making, which is that copyright protects working creatives. I am not at all saying that all artists only make work for money.
It is working artists we are talking about; working artists work for money.
That money, in the post-patronage era, comes from exercising copyright. The reason the copyright can’t simply die with them is that this tends to dissuade the creation of long-gestating work.
Copyright was developed to make it possible for artists, writers, musicians etc. to work for long periods on work of significance with no income, on the basis of the future, deferred earnings of the work, without their work being stolen from them, and it gives them the limited right to direct how their work is monetised on their behalf, including establishing publishing rights etc.
Some protection after death is a key component of that, because people do die while they are still working.
The current "lifetime of the author + X years" rules in effect in the United States still carry the same perverse incentive, though the incentive diminishes rapidly as X gets larger; with the very large value of X in effect today the perverse incentive is so small as to be effectively non-existent, but it's still there in theory.
Personally, I'd prefer a fixed term. I know enough independent authors making a living from selling their books that I'm willing to allow the fixed term to be large, like 50 years from date of completion of the work. (With a good definition of "completion" so someone can't cheat by editing a couple lines per year to keep something copyrighted indefinitely). The simpler the rule is, the easier it is to understand, and the harder it is to cheat it. The more complicated you make a rule, the more loopholes get found.
That dead man took the risk of not earning much in his lifetime, to continue feeding his family even after his passing. You might as well ask why does someone acquire life insurance.
