If you're looking to strike a balance, there also needs to be a good-faith effort to make the work available to the public domain after the copyright term expires.
For software, the original creative work (source code) should need to be escrowed. And the same for any work obfuscated with DRM.
I disagree. I do not think there should be an obligation for a creator to give away their work after the copyright expires. They just no longer get the benefit of having a legal mechanism to prevent others from copying/using it.
Let's look at music for an example. Copyright provides a period in which they original artist had control over how the work is handled commercially. After the copyright expires the original artist can no longer use the law to prevent other people from redistributing or reproducing the work. However, the artist has no obligation to release the studio masters.
Copyright makes it more viable for the creator to actually make a moving from their work. So to answer your question, the public is encouraging creative work.
In the case of software, the work itself would no longer be protected from reproduction or duplication by others, but there is no obligation for the original creator to facilitate the reproduction by others.
That's not at all true. People have access to the work by virtue of owning copies of it. Music can be played. Software can be reverse-engineered or just copied. Artwork can be copied. The ideas which are the core unique value of creative work are already out in the world by virtue of the work being seen and handled by the public. Copyright exists to provide the creator protection so that they can release their creation to the world without fear of it being immediately devalued by duplication. Without copyright I don't want to release my new idea, I want to keep it secret and charge people ridiculous amounts to have access.
Society has never demanded people hand over their work without compensation. Copyright is not at all about handing over the source of your works. Copyright is about artificially preventing other people from duplicating your work for a period of time. When that time expires, others are allowed to reproduce your work, but you are not required to hand over your sources.
When a carpenter makes a chair he can claim copyright on the design of the chair. During the time that his design is under copyright nobody else is allowed to make chairs that are obviously copied or derived from his design. When the copyright expires the design is no longer protected, but nobody goes to the original carpenter to confiscate his inventory and release it to the public, nor to appropriate his designs. Those are his. He still owns the designs. They are just no longer protected by law from duplication.
DRM directly destroys this "ownership" you speak of. There is no long-term access to a work that expects to phone home on every use.
You seem to be coming from the baseless framework of imaginary property wherein creation of property rights is a bona fide good thing, regardless of whether they're congruent with the underlying physics. However, the base law of this jungle is that copying is easy, creators have DRM, and the public has VHS and P2P.
Copyright is justified by the framework of a tradeoff whereby the naturally-existing public domain is retarded in order to encourage the creation of more works that will enter it at a later time. You still haven't directly addressed why the public should agree to restrict itself from copying media, only for the copyright owner to renege on their contribution when the monopoly period is up.
First: I entirely agree with you regarding DRM. Second: the "baseless framework" of property rights is how it has worked for centuries. Hardly baseless. The new world is the exception and I don't see how it has materially changed the rights of a creator to their own works.
I will say that our current system is extremely broken with regard to the public domain, primarily because of things like DRM and intellectual property, both of which I believe are harmful to society as a whole. I also believe copyright had been extended for way too long. These are things we should push hard to change because I agree, they break the implicit agreement that justifies copyright.
But in the world you are imagining, every new work of any kind would have to be registered with someone to make sure the sources are made public when the copyright expires. Then of course, you would have the massive enforcement effort to ensure the sources actually get released. Little Jimmy starts working a little game on his parents' computer? Better register that with the copyright office so the sources don't get lost in ten years when the copyright expires. It's ridiculous. That's not the way it works and its not the way it should work.
The framework of explicit "imaginary property" is new, within the past few decades. Thinking of copyright (et al) as general property rights leads to errant conclusions. Such as that at copyright expiration, the owner is forfeiting their "property" to the government. I refer to it as baseless because it's not modeling physical reality (information isn't exclusive-use), but backfitted based on wishful thinking of how some would -like- the world to operate.
Registering a work would be quite easy in this day and age - a hash for confidential priority, and then an easy upload to cement the registration. "Little Jimmy" wouldn't need to register anything until he decided to start distributing his game, and only then if he wished to take advantage of copyright.
Works being implicitly granted copyright is at the root of the problem with DRM.
A DRMed track is not a creative work, but a mechanically-created derivative of a creative work. Allowing the original creative work to remain secret while still allowing copyright on mechanical derivations of it creates the situation where the content creator can have their cake and eat it too, by releasing a crippled limited-purpose derivative with no intent to add the work to the public domain.
The crux of the matter is this - if creators use the law of the computational jungle to prevent full access to the work (to remix/port/etc) after copyright expiry, then why should members of the public not similarly revert to the law of the computational jungle wherein copying is Free?
> The crux of the matter is this - if creators use the law of the computational jungle to prevent full access to the work (to remix/port/etc) after copyright expiry, then why should members of the public not similarly revert to the law of the computational jungle wherein copying is Free?
In this I believe we agree. I completely agree that any technical protections applied to the distributed work should be removed, or at the very least allowed to be removed by others after the period of copyright expires.
For software, the original creative work (source code) should need to be escrowed. And the same for any work obfuscated with DRM.