Starfield

Talk to your local politicians about copyright reform.

Death of the creator +70 years is absolutely absurd, and we only got here because of Disney repeatedly lobbying to make it longer specifically so that Mickey Mouse could be kept out of the public domain. (And now, Mickey is public domain, so can we finally give up on that?)

Instead, copyrights should only be valid for 20 years, just like patents.

Imagine if everything up to 2006 was public domain... Imagine the kinds of movies, books, and video games we might be getting if everyone was able to use the characters, story, world, etc of anything from 2006 or earlier. Imagine how much creativity has gone to waste because that's not yet possible. Fallout and Fallout 2 would already be public domain, freely available for others to do remakes of or sequels to. Fallout 3 would be public domain in 2 more years.

Then there's the software side, too. Every Windows version before Vista would be public domain, and Vista would become public domain this November. And then what about Microsoft Office? And Adobe Photoshop? Old -- but still usable -- versions of all kinds of software would become free, perhaps even with source code leaks/releases ... and that could also really help open-source software, especially when it comes to compatibility with (formerly) closed-source software.

(Plus, that would make copyrights and public domain much more easy to figure out and manage. Currently, it can be quite difficult to determine when a certain work is public domain or not, thanks to the timeline being based on the death of the creator. Not only do you need to know when the work was made, you also need to track down the creator and find out when they died ... which is sometimes very difficult for more obscure creators. If the timeline is instead based on when the work was first made, everything becomes very simple. Take today's date, subtract 20 years, and everything made before that date is free game. No need for further questions and investigation.)

It's insane that under the current system, something made by a young and long-lived creator could easily end up being copyright-protected (with a state-enforced monopoly) for 150 years or more. The whole country is only 250 years old! (It's difficult to verify, but entirely plausible that there may be works that were originally made in 1876 or even earlier, and still protected by copyright today.)

In most cases, the vast majority of the profits from a copyrighted work happen in the first 1 to 2 years. Most copyrighted works are earning little or no money after 5 years. So 20 years is already plenty generous, ample time for creators to make profit from their work and be rewarded for creating it. If you don't manage to cash in on your creation within 20 years, well -- too bad. The very few creators who lose out on money because of that are more than made up for by the societal benefit of being able to freely reproduce and remix all of these more recent IPs. It's the same as with patents -- you have 20 years to cash in on your invention and be rewarded for making it, and then it becomes public property to benefit everyone.