Reforming copyright length is more straightforward than trying to come up with some roundabout way to incentivize it. Angry Birds was released in 2009, 14 years ago. By its publisher's own admission, it has run the bulk of its financial value. Angry Birds should now be in the public domain, including source code that should have been escrowed as the creative work (distributed binaries are mere mechanical derivatives). Copyright is not property - one decade is plenty of time to economically benefit from a work, after which a work is solidly in the commons of culture and shouldn't be subject to monopoly control.
> Reforming copyright length is more straightforward than trying to come up with some roundabout way to incentivize it.
It would seem like that naively, but we've seen that even stopping the copyright term from continually lengthening has been impossible. Making surface changes to copyright (that could easily be rolled back) will take as much or more effort than rebasing copyright on a clearer, more logical foundation that takes public benefit as a baseline. With a logical restructuring would come new arguments and slogans that might build up enough inertia to get it done.
Simply cutting back copyright length is hard to argue for, because the number you would be arguing to cut it back to is just as arbitrary as the number that the media industry would like to extend it to. Hell, I think that life of the author plus 70 years was chosen because it's biblical sounding: a biblical life is 70 years, so life plus 70 is a way of saying "children" without saying "children." For that reason, I don't think "one decade is plenty" is going to be an effective argument against life plus 70; the only thing a decade has going for it is that it's a round number and people are superstitiously attracted to round numbers.
Presently, the political arguments are ultimately just pointing out the absurd inequity of the current regime, so that people stop believing in and following these laws that the content cartels bought and will continue to buy. The only way to overcome thoroughly entrenched corruption is through mass disobedience, like the "drug war". The summary of what I really think about the combination of copyright, DMCA anti-circumvention and summary takedown, restrictions created from computational complexity, and monopolistic app stores, etc is "do what you want 'cause a pirate is free".
The path to real progress is getting the masses to self actualize and use self-representing computing technology, rather than falling for the siren song of advertising dollars promising fallacious convenience. These monopolist-makes-arbitrary-problematic-decision stories are mostly irrelevant once you've escaped their proprietary locked down world. Sure, it's less good that I can't just type "angry birds" into Aurora Store and have the game magically appear, but if I cared that much about it I should have kept a copy when I first installed it. But even though I didn't I can probably find it in some android torrent anyway - similar to every other orphaned work.
It distresses me greatly that we've forgotten this so thoroughly that you see people actually saying out loud that copyright is a property right. It most certainly is not, and was never represented as such until fairly recently.
