author plus seventy years, automatically created, with no registration or re-
newal requirements.

One of the strongest reasons that the copyright industry has raised for the
elimination of this renewal requirement is the injustice that comes from a
family's or author's losing copyright protection merely because of a techni-
cality. If "technicality" means something like the registration was lost in the
mail or was delivered two hours late, then the complaint is a good one.
There is no reason to punish authors for slips. But the remedy for an overly
strict system is a more relaxed system, not no system at all. If a registration is
lost or a deadline missed by a short period of time, the U.S. Copyright Of-
fice should have the power to forgive.

A change in the copyright term would have no effect on the incentives for
authors to produce work today. There is no author who decides whether or
not to write a book depending upon whether he or his estate will receive
money three-quarters of a century from now. The same with a film pro-
ducer: Hollywood studios forecast revenues a few years into the future, not
ninety-five. The effect on expected income from this change would there-
fore be tiny.

But the benefit for creativity from more works falling into the commons
would be large. If a copyright isn't worth it to an author to renew for a modest
fee, then it isn't worth it to society to support -- through an array of criminal
and civil statutes -- the monopoly protected. But the same work that the origi-
nal author might not value could well be used by other creators in society.

Even more significant, this repository of data about what work is pro-
tected would lower the costs of licensing copyrighted works significantly.
Because the database would be relatively fresh -- with a requirement that
contact information be kept current -- creators who want to license other
creators' work would have a simple tool to do so.

/tab\/tab\SOFTWARE COPYRIGHT/tab\/tab\

Software is a special case. The current protection for software is the life
of an author plus seventy years or, if a corporation, ninety-five years. This is
a parody of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited
times." When Apple Macintosh's operating system falls into the public do-
main, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of
copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

Worse, the copyright system protects software without getting any new
knowledge in return. When the system protects Hemingway, we at least get

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v?