"A few of the best places to start such work on would be to focus on reducing the length of copyright terms and generally allowing non-commercial usages, redistribution/copying/similar, and modifications/derivatives."

I agree with you completely but by far the biggest challenge is to get changes to international copyright/IP law and that's proved (and is still proving to be) extremely difficult to achieve. The only significant changes to the Berne Convention† in over a century have been to tighten copyright provisions. The trouble is that getting changes to international agreements, especially long-entrenched ones such as copyright treaties, is about the most difficult of any law to change. Essentially, such treaties are set in stone because so many countries are signatories to them, and experience has demonstrated that copyright/IP law has powerful backers in almost every signatory country.

Even if, say, one country wanted to make significant changes to its copyright law then the treaty binds it and thus it's unable to do so. Moreover, any said country cannot simply walk away if it disagrees with the treaty as it'd be deemed a pariah and would be subject to sanctions. A country withdrawing from a treaty puts it in a very different situation to that in which it would have had been in had it never signed the treaty in the first instance.

An example of this is North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) which it signed in 1985. It's now a pariah and subject to huge sanctions since its withdrawal. India and Pakistan both of whom never signed the NPT are not in the same dire situation (they're criticized for not joining the NPT but that's all that's ever happened to them). If any country withdrew unilaterally from IP treaties then it'd receive the same treatment as North Korea. And to make matters worse, I'm sure that just about every country on the planet is already a signatory to the treaty.

I've been watching the copyright debate for well over several decades now and I've seen negligible beneficial change to copyright law, if anything the situation is now significantly worse than it was 20-plus years ago before the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Frankly, I'm quite depressed about it, copyright holders have such a hold over the treaty, WIPO etc. that I don't expect to see any truly beneficial changes to IP law within my remaining lifetime.

The rot set in very early on with the first and second copyright conventions starting around 1883 at the beginning of the lead up to the first Berne Convention of 1886 and then the Paris Convention of 1896. Victor Hugo and cronies were in the forefront lobbying for such a convention, and at the time, as now, the public had essentially no interest in copyright (back then, most people would never have heard of copyright let alone ever having bothered to get a delegate to lobby on their behalf. With essentially no opposition Hugo et al got away with carte blanche, that is they got the treaty exactly as they wanted it to be. Right, the treaty was a damn disaster even more so given that it had such a huge running start without any significant opposition—as we've seen, catching up has proved impossible (I keep wishing someone would prove me wrong but to date there's never been a hit of evidence to that effect).

Several years ago Cory Doctorow succinctly summed up problem with words to the effect that the average person is simply not interested in copyright law—full stop! Even if people have heard of copyright and or know about it, it still takes a very low priority in their lives when compared to other matters that they're concerned about such as the economy, price of fuel, housing etc., etc. Therefore, politicians aren't interested in doing anything about it, after all they're not going to lose votes over the issue from the citizenry, and more likely copyright advocates will gain their favor by supporting politicians' campaign funds etc.

The only way I see forward is for a well-organized international organization along the lines of, say, the EFF but one that's much larger and more powerful to take up the cudgel and run with it. I first started raising this suggestion online well over a decade ago but I've yet to see the slightest evidence that anyone's interested.

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† Don't you mean the 1886 Berne Convention? I'm unaware there was one in 1909, but the Paris Convention was in 1896 and the one after that was the Berlin Convention, which if I recall correctly, was in 1910.