> I'm also not hurting anyone by making copies of things, the only negative side-effect is that the creator might make less money.

This is not true, and this is codified into copyright law already. A discussion of copyright cannot continue past this point until it’s understood and agreed that using others’ work without permission comes with multiple kinds of social harm. People can be and have been sued for breach of copyright without either making a financial gain nor taking away from the creator’s financial gain. It’s fundamentally damaging because it’s not yours to copy and distribute, and there are reasons beyond money why, including a variety of ways it can affect your reputation. The law has only been getting more clear on this point that nobody should have to justify why they wish to reserve all rights and not allow others to take their work, which is why copyrights became default-on for everything created, and no longer requires registration.

> I don’t care if others sell copies of my work

This is great! This must mean that your income doesn’t depend on your creative work, right? It’s important to fully understand that many people do care, not only if others resell their works, but they care deeply if others even redistribute their work.

20 + 50 seems like it could be reasonable-ish to me but how do you arrive at that “ought to be long enough to make their money”? How long does it take, on average, for creators including all the non-Disney entities? Given that this has to work well on balance for everyone. Why should it even matter how long it takes for a creator to “make their money”?

(I meant 20 + 30, not 20 + 50, sorry for the confusion.)

I don't think I understand in what ways it can be damaging to reputation. Maybe you mean if I pretended to be the original author? Because in that case I think it's a different issue than copyright. You can have no copyright but still have laws about proper disclaimers and proper attribution, and I'd be in favor of that. I don't care if I have to clearly and explicitly label all my derivative works as a "fanwork", so long as I'm allowed to legally make and distribute them at all.

Other than that, you mentioned "multiple kinds of social harm". But I'm looking through your other comments on this submission, and the only other place where I've found where you explicitly state a harm is here:

> That claim doesn’t hold water when the pirate is enjoying the value of the work, and is ignoring the costs of it’s creation including time.

Which as far as I can tell is just the money issue again. Sorry if I missed another harm that you mentioned, but for now as far as I can tell every harm is either money, or a harm which can be addressed by much less restrictive laws than copyright.

Now, assuming that money is the only harm of copying, which is what I believe, then it's the only issue that copyright needs to deal with. And given that copyright has harms of its own, both socially and with respect to freedom*, then once money is dealt with I think the copyright should be removed.

So then it becomes a debate on what would be a "reasonable" copyright, which would mostly avoid the "money" harm, while also mostly avoiding the harms of copyright itself. I don't think it makes sense to reward children for their parents' creation (except insofar as they might inherit money that the parent has already earned), so I think anything longer than life is already much too long.

I think 50 is more than enough, since someone making a work at 20 will be able to receive income from it until they're 70, which is almost their entire life. I think it's very rare that a work will make no money for the first 50 years but then suddenly start making money, but even in that case the author will probably have already moved on, made more works and/or made money in other ways by then, so at that point the monetary harm is less important.

I'm in favor of requiring manually registering to extend copyright past 20 because I think most works will never make money and are not intended to make money (most memes, for example), so those works should become public domain faster. I also think that most works that make money will have started doing so in the first 20 years, so it will be rare that a money-making work will unintentionally enter the public domain after 20 years.

I'll note that I'm less confident about registration than about shorter copyright. However, I view the "manual registration" as a compromise, so if we removed it and just went for a flat number of years, I would advocate for less than 50 years, maybe 30 or 40.

(*I think it's a restriction on my freedom that I have things in my head which I can't use. It wouldn't be realistic to argue that I should avoid looking at any copyrighted material my entire life, and as long as I can't feasibly do that and still take part in society, I will have ideas derived from copyrighted works and be unable to legally act on them)

Edit: I should also address startups and corporations making software. In that case, 50 years is already quite long, and the software almost never stays exactly as it is, it evolves. And every new change will last another 20-50 years. So you'll only be able to use version 20-50 years out of date, so in almost all cases the corporation will still have their competitive edge.

> Now, assuming that money is the only harm of copying, which is what I believe

This is exposing your assumptions, biases, and lack of complete understanding of copyright and the history of copyright. It doesn’t take long to find examples of reputational damage if you search it, nor is it hard to imagine some, so it seems clear you haven’t even tried.

Reputational damage that can affect a creator’s entire business includes, but is not limited to: someone distributing lower quality copies, leading to a reputation of low quality; someone distributing cheaper copies, leading to a reputation of being too expensive; many people distributing slightly changed works, leading to a reputation of stylistic abundance, non-exclusivity, or non-uniqueness. Plagiarism is different than copyright, but there absolutely is overlap, and making derivative works that contain large sizeable portions is a gray area where the derivative author can legally take credit and give the impression that they authored all of the work when they didn’t.

The rest of your comment is elaborating on your opinions without providing any of the justification I asked for. What makes you qualified to opine on how long it takes for a creator to make “enough money”? What makes you qualified to decide that a certain amount of monetary harm is “less important”? I don’t care how many years you think feels good to you; I’m asking for an evidence based demonstration that it’s the right number for society, or a strong argument for why that shouldn’t be the criteria. Neither of those is easy, but you haven’t even broached them.

I did propose a solution to all these reputational damages you mentioned: requiring clearly labeling derivative works as derivative works. Someone selling something that looks like your work won't affect your reputation if they have to explicitly and clearly disclaim that the derivative work has nothing to do with you. We can make this requirement last significantly longer than copyright.

And someone selling copies cheaper might give you a reputation for being too expensive, but a) that's the money issue again, and b) this can only happen after 20-50 years, at which point you've had plenty of time to build your business, and c) even after 20-50 years, you only have a problem if you were completely stagnant, because any new changes you made to the work will last 20-50 years after the most recent change.

If you don't think that this solution is sufficient, then it would seem that we've found the main point of disagreement.

You also asked:

> What makes you qualified to opine on how long it takes for a creator to make “enough money”? What makes you qualified to decide that a certain amount of monetary harm is “less important”?

The way I answer these questions is by viewing money as a means to an end. I think money only matters insofar as it positively or negatively affects someone's life, so to me the question is, "to what extent is this person negatively impacted by less money 20-50 years later, compared to everyone who is negatively impacted by the restrictions on their actions?"

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As for the rest of my comment, I was elaborating on my opinions, yes. And yes, these opinions are largely based on what seems reasonable to me. I don't have the desire nor time to do a thorough study to find the actually correct number of years, and even if I did, the question is sufficiently complicated that I expect that there would still be a lot of uncertainty left even after thorough research. In addition, since it's partially a moral issue, gut feeling will always be a necessary component of this.

Finally, your original question wasn't about concrete numbers, merely persuasiveness:

> But, devil’s advocate, I haven’t heard a super convincing argument as to why something I make should ever revert to public domain, especially while I’m alive. Why shouldn’t I have the right to take my work to my grave and never have someone else profit from it?

So I don't feel bad about explaining my own point of view, which is persuasive to me even if not to you, as an attempt to answer that question.