Copyright 2.0

So it's fairly well agreed that copyright lasts way too long, at least according to anyone who isn't being paid by Disney. The original copyright term was only 14 years, and there's actually a fairly compelling economics paper showing that if you pick a reasonable set of parameters, you end up with 15 as the magic number.

But it's not likely copyright law will change anytime soon. Too many people make too much money from it, and copyright's now a global trade issue; governments don't want to be the only suckers on the world stage with some weird copyright law. But who needs the law anyway? Or, more accurately, who needs new law? We could make our own copyright!

Since you can put basically whatever restrictions you want in a license agreement, you have a kind of delegated copyright power. If you decided that a particular kind of copyright law would be better, and assuming it's a subset of current copyright law, there's nothing to stop you from applying it to your own work.

So maybe some serious copyright people could get together and draft up a Copyright 2.0 with 15-year terms and remixing and whatever else Lawrence Lessig thinks is a good idea. It won't do much about Disney, but I think there are a lot of people out there who would be happy to voluntarily give back the extra powers that copyright law handed out.