I have not yet seen any serious person argue for a shorter term…
The Copyright Act of 1790, passed by some of the same guys who ratified the Constitution, gave a term of 14 years with a possible extension of another 14 years, and they made no news exception despite there being a great many newspapers at the time. For better or worse you’re going against a couple centuries of precedent here if you want to push for a term substantially shorter.than the first ones ever.
Next, you seem to forget that fair use exists and allows broader use of copyrighted material if it’s newsworthy. It’s why you can see the “Tank Man” photo for free on Wikipedia. Copyright here mainly means AP gets a slice when someone tries to make money off it.
There’s also practical problems. First, you’re killing the incentive for news organizations to keep photo archives. If they can’t make money off of reprints, why spend the money preserving them? Then, when implementing this, who does this affect? If you narrowly target it to corporate news organizations you’re just setting yourself up for equal protection challenges and businesses playing cute with their formal organization. If you apply it to all work-for-hire works you’re penalizing non-news businesses. If you apply it to all newsworthy photographs you’re dicking over individual freelancers and amateurs.
I just don’t see there being a problem that’s worse than the situation produced by your solution.
