I am an author who relies on copyright for part of my living, yet I agree that copyright protection lasts too long. I feel like it should protect the work for a reasonable time--say 20 years--after which one must pay an initially modest but exponentially increasing fee to renew the copyright every X years. Big players like Disney could afford to keep their stuff out of the public domain for a while, but not forever. And many deceased artists' work would slip into the public domain when their estate could no longer afford the renewal fee.
This is an excellent solution. We also need to dial back the domain of conditional restrictions that authors can place on works that they release to the public.
I'm tired of watching old shows that have had music redubbed because of the labyrinthian copyright conditions that inherently arise in composite works.
