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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

The cost of renewal will be 10% of the estimated value of the copyright to the rights holder for the next ten years

This alone would force many things that are actively being developed into the PD, because people won't have the funds on hand. Unless I misunderstand your proposal.

EDIT:

And, the impact of that would be that richer companies would swoop in and get free work. Sounds bad. Real bad.

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Or only the rich can afford copyright. Or like you said, the rich can be the "patron" of poor artists and keep them on a leash.

Yeah this was my biggest concern actually, but I hadn't thought of a good way around it until now.

Good point. What if we switched it around to being 10% of anything you made in the previous 10 years. Renewal for in development would then be free. And then maybe put a limit on the number of free renewals. So either commercialize it or release it after some number of years.

Lookup "Hollywood accounting" to see how well that will go.

For example, from the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting): According to Lucasfilm, Return of the Jedi, despite having earned $475 million at the box office against a budget of $32.5 million, "has never gone into profit"

Disney could renew the copyright on "Return of the Jedi" for pennies on the dollar.

It would be based on revenue not profit. Yes, they could be tricky, but the IRS manages to get them, I'm sure the copyright office could too.

I suppose you could set it up so things that are still under development and not being sold (and hence the creators can't have extracted any value) don't need copyright protection and are instead treated like trade secrets.

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