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But there's plenty of things made 10 years ago that are still very relevant and still generating money for the creators. I think that's the concern.

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Yeah. New Order are still making good money from Blue Monday from 1983, and clearly there’s a lot of interest in The Beatles still.

Maybe a shorter period of time with an option to extend it like a snooze feature on an alarm clock.

But does having a work enter public domain automatically mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams via legitimate services like Spotify?

That’s something that’s probably not been figured out yet. Probably won’t be figured out until popular stuff from the 50s and 60s starts hitting PD.

Why would Spotify pay anybody for playing a public domain song?

Good point! :D

Presumably if they want to have access to the non-PD stuff they’d have to figure out something.

The option to extend it being priced by the royalties collected and requiring substantial accounting of such.

Patents, for example, have maintenance fees that are quite high. So even that 20 year length is not really automatic and guaranteed, while already seen as problematically long to many.

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