I'm beginning to wonder if copyright and patent protections have ever been of net benefit to the economy.
In many fields you specifically research patents in order to avoid accidentally infringing on them. This is not stimulating innovation in any productive sense, it is forcing innovation where we find cumbersome workarounds because the way(s) to do a thing that work are patented and licences cost far more than they are worth.
Want to build a web site that sells things to people? Right out of the gate you have Amazon’s 1-click patent to deal with. So you need to find a way to allow people to buy stuff that doesn’t violate the 1-click patent while also making it usable for people so they can actually buy stuff.
But other "inventors" claim the whole problem, including solutions that any interviewee would have produced in twenty minutes. That's where examiners' incentives demand bad decisions.
You don't think that popular books and movies like the "Harry Potter" series helped the economy? People pay for the licensed content and entire industries are born that don't hurt anybody, and nobody is coerced to partake in it.
There was a recent HN thread about Germany's economic boom in the 19th century being largely due to no copyright law - and a huge proliferation of technical books of every description.
In the US, Hollywood was started to evade patent enforcement. Isn't it ironic how they aggressively defend IP protection now?
Copyright, for a LIMITED time (say 10 years without registration, and renewed in 10 year blocks //with// registration and steeply increasing fee) sounds like it'd be helpful to the economy as well as encourage creators of high quality content to register.
The exponentially increasing fee would also be a way of keeping actively stewarded and relevant properties under maintenance.
I also think that, similar to song covers, a maximum compelled fee for reproduction should also exist (to prevent with-holding content from the public).
An obvious example might be the brilliant novel that goes ignored by critics. If it were to easily lose copyright protection, then a producer could adapt it into a movie and pay the author nothing. But there are thousands of great novels (and many more terrible ones) for every successful one, so you need to protect all of them, and do so cheaply, in order to make sure the successful one is protected.