What do you think a reasonable form of copyright law would look like?
I haven't figured out a way to push this narrative in any meaningful way. People have a hard time distinguishing arguments against copyright from arguments for copyright reform. Most of the time I have to stress that I'm not for copyright abolishment but more reasonable copyright terms and extension protocols.
One tradeoff is to have the fee be proportional to the revenue it is generating. But this could encourage extension-by-default, rather than making it an intentional decision the copyright holder has to make: Is it worth "buying the monopoly rights." I think I would be ok with that if the increase for future extensions was steep. But that does also come at the cost of the second part,
> that doesn't become popular until later
You have a small-time creator that doesn't extend, and so loses out on massive potential revenue derived from future popularity of the work decades later. This would be unfortunate ... but on the other hand I think society would be more likely to make this true and create interesting derivative works if there were more works that were derivable. You need to keep durations short to make that happen.
Every 10 years, declare that your work is worth $x, then pay a renewal fee of $x/10 (or some other fraction based on more solid economics).
If anyone volunteers to pay more than $x in place of your $x/10 your work is now public domain.
I have a much simpler solution: copyright terms are fourteen years from date of publication. There are no extensions.
It could even be a lot shorter nowadays. Nearly all media gets nearly all of its profit in the first year. A lot of commercial software goes out of date in a few months rather than yearly releases.
It really isn't. It's a temporary privilege of state enforced monopoly.
We are not just balancing the individual creators vs corporations, but also creators of derived works, and societies benefit at-large of more creative works in general. We want to maintain and compensate creators "enough" to maintain incentives for creation, but otherwise maximize the commons.
Patent law would, ideally, be abolished altogether as I'm not convinced that other types of patents are any more legitimate than software patents. Trademarks should not expire, of course, but there should be restrictions on what you can trademark to protect the public domain (for example, the mouse corporation shouldn't be able to evade the copyright term limits by trademarking its characters).
Copyright is meant to be a "public pact" to encourage creation and innovation.
But think about that goal for a minute. It doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to create one awesome thing once and then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.
Instead, it should give you a reasonable amount of time to benefit from the fruits of it, but afterward, you should be encouraged to create again. So you'd be motivated not just by the carrot of making a lot of money over a 10-year span after launch, but also by the stick that you will no longer get royalties after 10 years, so you need to keep innovating. There is even a study out there that shows that the buyers of most books drastically drops after 10 years.
This benefits society at large, since it creates more competition, both from the original author of a work, but also by others who are then allowed to make iterations of the original work.
That's why patents are time-limited, too. The idea isn't to give one company the "right" to make money off an invention for eternity, but to allow the whole society to profit from it eventually by allowing others to drastically improve upon that original idea afterward.
But why was it ever intended as a "public pact" and not like an "actual right" that authors have? Because let's not forget that no idea is 100% original.
In fact, most aren't even 10% original. We all live "on the shoulders of giants" as they say. So most works are just rehashing of old works - so that also means that if enforcement was 100% the inflow of new works would drastically be reduced. So you don't "deserve" to benefit from a "new work" that's actually mostly rehashed old ideas anyway.
I always recommend watching the Everything is a Remix series to get a new perspective on this based on the history of copyrighted works:
You probably should abandon this account and create a new one that isn't "dead" on post.
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> Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it originally had.
Samuel Clemens stated that if copyright was shortened to this long or shorter, then he would not issue books. Instead he'd public chapters as to restart the clock for each. And naturally, would arbitrarily lengthen copyright to however long he'd string readers by.
As for me, I have no answers. This problem is larger than I think anyone can view.
Regardless, that copyright was 7-10 years originally is close but not quite right in a way that matters: it was 14 years with the ability to request a 14 year extension. (This being the same in the US law which came much later, but was originally from the Statute of Anne in the UK.)
So like, 10 is close enough to 14 and yet, not only do those 4 years feel (to me) like they matter a lot, it is arguably 28, and 7 is definitely underselling the protection they were being granted. That said, it also only applied (in the US) to books, maps, and charts, so in some sense wasn't even the same, broad concept.
The discussion of how long over time is interesting as, in a very real sense, our ability to monetize copyright quickly has increased: the Internet lets you immediately address a nationwide market, while it easily could have taken decades with nothing but (expensive to use) printing presses making materials to distribute around using (slow) horses and (for even wider distribution) boats.
These days, I almost get the impression that a lot of media companies try to make the vast majority of money off of something in the first few MONTHS and then nigh-unto discard it entirely--not even bothering to finish things for later syndication--while they move on to new content and new IP.
They are then occasionally mining their old catalogs of IP to do like, a "reboot", but I frankly feel like no one would stop making content if they lost the ability to later do that, and I also doubt that the original creators are being compensated much for that later possibility (as it is so hit and miss).
Instead the benefit of creative works would almost exclusively to middle-men who created nothing.
7 years is sooo short. Many TV shows and book series take longer than that from start to finish. And often times they grow in popularity.
Movies based on books frequently come out more than 10 years after the book resulting in a surge of popularity. With 10 years the original author would see no benefit from either the movie or their new book sales! There’d be a lot of fat cats, just not the actual creator.