> Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation.
My favorite scheme is that all copyright last for 10 years by default. You can register it for $100 for another 10 years. And every 10 years after that, the cost goes up by 100x. That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly.
Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked a bit, but I think the idea is fundamentally sound.
I actually have the opposite view: I'm more worried about a small-time author that say, makes living on a low-volume text or training book, than I am protecting Mickey Mouse.
Another justification: if the harms increase for giving an author exclusivity for a longer time, society should demand a larger payback. This may only be justified for the most prominent works
It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more, and then 100x for every 10 additional years. Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price, and then the price ramps steeply so that very few works are registered beyond 40 years.
A tiny proportion of works will be worth the $50k step, let alone the $5M one. Even Disney will not pay $5M for most things.
And, of course, things that are forgotten or devoid of commercial value will lapse at 20.
A lot of stuff simply has no commercial value after 5 years. This is for software, BTW; for movies or books, different terms might make more sense.
IMO, it's important to have a short default period. The vast majority of content - posts, comments, videos, tweets, open source software, etc. will never be registered. It's a huge benefit to get that into the public domain as fast as possible while still providing a reasonable period of exclusivity to creators.
If you're really wedded to the 30 year thing, I think an initial 10 years, and 20 years for the first registered period is a better balance.
The final arbiter was never "does it have commercial value still?" until today. That's a purely modern perspective pushed by companies like Disney, because of course it is. That's all they care about. We don't have to care about that. In fact, I'd suggest it's completely immoral to accept that framing when we look at how important public domain has historically been to our culture.
Protect for 40 years for a million? Sure. Probably worth it for mega IPs
50 years for $100m? Still doable but it really starts to hurt.
60 for $10B? Maybe Pokemon and Mikey mouse can justify it, but very very few.
By 70 years it's simply not worth it.
>This scheme seems to protect the largest companies with the largest bank accounts the most. Why would we want a system like that?
Because the small time authors really won't care in 20 years anyway. Even if the cost to renew is a pittance. Are there authors trying to sell the copyright to a failed IP in 30 years?
Hard to find the right balance, but what we have now is asinine.
That said I like the exponential scheme.
Works with little to no commercial activity should be protected longer to provide more opportunity to do so and give more protection to unknowns.
For small-time authors, why should they enjoy the intellectual property rights for the rest of their life? The vast majority of people need to keep working to keep generating money.
Free, 1% of revenue, 10% of revenue, 100%, 1000% etc.
Thus non commercial darlings could be kept relatively long without high cost but all commercial offerings would wither off relatively quick. Pipe dream as obviously companies in power are controllers here.
But wouldn't we want the valuable works to enter the public domain faster than the worthless works?
That's going to create a lot of paperwork for not much value. Much better to have 10 year extensions. Your pricing scheme is functionally equivalent to starting at $2000 for 10 years, and increasing the cost by 1000x for each additional 10 years.
