Something I've been thinking about a bit:

There's a tendency among some people to romanticise the past, for example the Magna Carta is sometimes idealised, although a product of its time, and the American Constitution is seen by some as akin to a religious text. The Pirate Party already appeals to the original Copyright law a bit, and I wonder if more could be made of this. I don't really think the authors of the original patent and copyright laws were privy to divine inspiration or anything, but that said, I don't think the original laws were too bad in their time (certainly in comparison to the current situation), so if anyone might think the authors of the original laws were privy to divine inspiration, it might not necessarily be a bad thing.

Copyright law was originally an initial 14 year term, renewable for another 14 years. Co-incidentally, recent research suggests the economically optimal copyright term to be slightly less than 15 years (and this figure seems to have been widely reported as 14 years). I do think this is just a co-incidence, especially since the economically optimal term may well have been longer in the past (perhaps closer to the full 28 years, who knows?), but it is perhaps a fortuitous one, because... look, the original copyright term (or the initial part of it) is precisely (more or less) equal to the economically ideal term as proven (or suggested) by research!

Other research suggests that a longer term might be economically optimal when works are not considered in isolation, and adaptations and sequels are considered, so perhaps this could be tied in with the second 14 year term--14 years copyright on the original work, and another 14 (for a total of 28) for derived works like adaptations and sequels.

There is a trade off here. I don't really think copyright should ideally be about either optimising economics, or sticking to original laws, and this would make copyright longer than I would ideally like it to be, but OTOH if it could make reform more achievable, then it might be a worthwhile trade off. Besides, as many people suggested in a recent poll, the length of copyright might not be as important as other rules around copyright, e.g. so long as personal copying and non-commercial fan-fic are legal, and DRM on copyright is not, then a relatively long copyright term may be liveable.

The original copyright law didn't have anything to say about personal copying or DRM, but then neither existed in its time. Copyright law didn't prevent personal coping, because a printing press was needed to make copies, so personal coping wasn't possible anyway--I think a reasonable argument can be made here. Copyright law didn't ban DRM, but then it didn't exist, and I think a parallel could be drawn with patent law, which requires disclosure for grant.

The original patent term was 14 years, but again, if other aspects of patent law were reformed, I think such a term may be liveable, e.g. exclude pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, software, and anything else where patents are used in place of an obvious better approach, or where patents are irrelevant to innovation, and are simply used to bludgeon competitors with nuisance lawsuits. AFAIK patent law was originally applied much less broadly than it is now, so this would be in line with the original application of the law.

So in short, I'm suggesting we reinstate copyright and patent law precisely as our forefathers originally intended them.