The West can end the endless pain and legal hurdles to innovation by limiting the copyright. They can do it if there is will to open up the gates of information to everyone. The duration of 70 years after death of the author or 90 years for companies is excessively long. It should be ~25 years. For software it should be 10 years.
And if AI companies want recent stuff, they need to pay the owners.
However, the West wants to infinitely enrich the lucky old people and companies who benefited from the lax regulations at the start of 20th century. Their people chose to not let the current generations to acquire equivalent wealth, at least not without the old hags get their cut too.
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.
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.
Won't people just wait 5 years to buy the book?