[redthrow]

The vast majority of books don't generate any profits past the first few years, so I prefer Lawrence Lessig's proposal of copyright renewal at five-year intervals with a fee. Under this scheme, most books would enter the public domain after five years

https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2003/Lessigcopyrigh...

Lessig: Not for this length of time, no. Copyright shouldn’t be anywhere close to what it is right now. In my book I proposed a system where you’d have to renew after every five years and you get a maximum term of 75 years. I thought that was pretty radical at the time. The Economist, after the Eldred decision, came out with a proposal—let’s go back to 14 years, renewable to 28 years. Nobody needs more than 14 years to earn the return back from whatever they produced.

[mark_l_watson]

Lessig’s proposal is excellent. A long time ago I wrote 10 books for publishers like McGraw-Hill, J Wiley, Springer-Verlag, etc.

For many reasons I switched to writing using a Creative Commons license using Lulu, LeanPub, and my own web site for distribution. This has been a win for me economically, it feels good to add to the commons, and it is fun.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Won't people just wait 5 years to buy the book?