>If you want to extend your copyright past, say, 15 or 20 years,
If you want to extend your copyright past 20 years, too bad. Come up with something new; that one's public domain now. Or it should be at any rate.
If you want to extend your copyright past 20 years, too bad. Come up with something new; that one's public domain now. Or it should be at any rate.
That being said: I think reforming copyright should allow fair use and incentives for curation. There's nothing wrong with the Beatles' heirs curating the Beatles recordings for streaming, and remastering them; as long as there's no prosecution for torrenting needle drops of old Beatles records, torrenting rips of old Beatles CDs from the 1990s, and making a streaming service of such recordings (the old ones, not the remasters) without needing permission of the heirs.
Just not exclusively.
Most copyrights are works for hire and owned by a corporation.
Your proposal would only work for unpublished works, and self-published works.
Personally, once I think a work is made available to the general public, it needs to enter the public domain, or enter a period of compulsory licensing, after a predetermined period of time. It doesn't matter if the copyright is owned by an individual or a corporation.