Fanfiction should be unambiguously allowed because nobody is making money off of it. Profiting off of somebody else’s ideas (while they still have copyright) without permission is wrong, and trying to pass off somebody else’s ideas for your own is wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with writing down the “what if?” ideas you have based on somebody else’s work and sharing them for free when everybody knows what is from the source and what is original. Anybody who thinks that fanon *is* canon is delusional and not worth the original author’s concern.

Is it known that the original reasoning for that length of time was? To be able to evaluate whether those parameters still exist or not?

I think my feelings about the general issue are similar to yours, but I probably arrive at them from a different place. I’m not a legal scholar, so I don’t really think about the laws that often or intricately. But I never understand it when authors get in a snit over Google Books or fanfiction or the like, saying “These are MY books and MY characters! How dare they!” If I wanted them to stay MY books and MY characters, I wouldn’t publish them?. I publish with the hope that the stories and characters I create will become something much more than “mine.” The magic of fiction, to me, comes in the interaction between the author’s text and the reader’s imagination. There are some literary characters and fictional worlds that gain such mass in the collective imagination, they really do take on a life of their own. Hamlet, Harry Potter, Holden Caufield, Elizabeth Bennet, Buffy. To create something that ceases to be “mine” and becomes “society’s”–dang, that’s the holy grail of authorship, in my eyes.

In other words, I think it is my fondest hope to inspire rampant copyright infringement.

You are right, doesn’t neeed to be quite THAT long.

Copyright is willed just like anything else. I can will my copyright to anyone, who can then give it (or sell it in toto) to anyone, anyone at all–almost as if it were a car or a house.

The difference is that my copyright expires 70 years after my death, and I think that’s too long.

I don’t see copyright as something that’s *mine*. I see it as something that belongs to society–I let you guys read what I wrote for all time, in return, you give me the chance to make a little money off it for a limited time. No reason society should give me something in exchange for nothing.

Life+70 years is effectively perpetual copyright–and I hate that.

And I know it’s not just about money, but what can happen in the direction of future books. Who’s the family of the deceased author who has absolute control over his works, and if I remember correctly, the family got into some legal snafu with another author when they wanted to publish a sequel to a book? (Or something like that, my memory remembers the barest of bones on that one).

I guess I would want the rights to belong to me, but I would also need a lawyer to explain it to me what copyright laws meant and what that entailed.