That's why the copyright term should be flexible. A natural way to achieve this would be to tax copyright (why not? many other properties are taxed, why not IP?) progressively over time. For example first three years zero tax, fourth year $1000 and doubling every year from that. When copyright holder is not willing to pay the tax anymore, the piece of work moves to public domain. This solves also the orphan works issue automatically. (Obviously, there are some international details to be sorted out with this idea.)
Then what about me. A lone programmer who can't afford to pay that much and takes advantage of the fact that software you write is implicitly copyrighted?
I think in my ideal system everything would get a decade or two implicitly. After that you'd need to register. I'm not sure there'd be much point in making registration expensive, either. It could probably be free.
The main principle is just that if you no longer care about something enough to do a little work to keep it, then the time has come to release the rights to that thing into the public domain. A bit of paperwork every ten years may be good enough for that.
Registration could also clarify ownership. Problems like what happened with NoLF [1] or Google Books might be less likely.
> A bit of paperwork every ten years may be good enough for that.
Disney would then be able to keep their copyrights as long as they want. They have the money to purchase politicians, why wouldn't they be able to spend a few extra grand or so to file paperwork.
There would be a limit on the number of renewals a work could have. Though, it's true that Disney would probably renew as many times as possible for all of its major works. The fact that the reform wouldn't seriously affect their business is a compromise to help make it more politically plausible.
