> they they should be able to recoup their investment in a timely manner and 10 years is not that huge with all the means of electronic distribution we have today.
It’s neither fair nor accurate to point at the speed distribution as an indicator of the speed of building a viable business. It’s a fact that it’s common for a business to need a decade to build it’s business pipeline before the business is viable and fully supporting its employees. Don’t forget this system needs to support small businesses and not just megacorps.
From the perspective of law, and of copyright specifically, it’s also a mistake to assume that all business can move at the pace of electronically distributed software. Physical hardware goods frequently take more than a year to design, manufacture, and stock prior to distribution. Today we can add in an extra year of COVID related delays for the ordering and distributing pipeline … how many things are on insane back order delay as we speak? Copyright needs to be long enough that things like today’s situation don’t prevent a business from even starting to recoup, right?
> I would call it pretty fast when you think it took several years for congress to vote the last “infrastructure law”
The point I was making is that law moves slower than tech. You would agree that infrastructure funding happens on a glacial pace compared to what’s hot on GitHub or what new ideas are being incorporated into neural network training, right? It’s fine to think of a few years being “fast”, but that’s a subjective opinion that isn’t relative to something specific. I was trying to make a comparison between law and the things presumably parent was calling “breakneck speed”, which is clearly referring to things that move faster than law.
I also mentioned “existing” laws for a specific reason - new laws can and sometimes do come up quickly. But laws we need to know in order to comply with need to be mostly stable. And by and large, most of our law doesn’t change every year, we have small nips and tucks mostly in places that don’t affect the majority of the population.