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Comment by ep103 | Hacker News Reader

Its the Mickey Mouse problem. Disney doesn't want Mickey or related works to enter public domain, because it would be a huge knock to their current empire.

Still, this seems rather easily solvable to naïve little old me.

20 year copyright by default, with a 20 year review cycle process an individual/company can apply to to ask for extension, on the condition that they can prove harm to newly generated IP, if the copyright is not-renewed. Still using Mickey Mouse to generate new works of non-derivative IP, and copyright of Mickey Mouse isn't causing damage to any other competing agencies (the way holding IP to a new drug or invention would)? Fine, renew granted.

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Why should Disney get an infinite copyright? I think copyright should be limited to natural persons. No one involved in the creation of Mickey Mouse is still alive. Imagine if the Brothers Grimm, Inc. had just kept infinitely renewing their copyright claim? Disney wouldn’t even exist. Disney is a company that was built upon works in the public domain and now is depriving the rest of the world from the very thing that allowed Disney to flourish in the first place.

Then what happens as humans solve aging and no one dies? There should be an age limit regardless of natural or corporate persons.

I feel like we can revisit when we reach this point :)

> solve aging and no one dies

I believe this may be an HN bubble thing. Fusion energy will be commercialized hundreds if not thousands of years before that will be reality.

I was being slightly facetious ;). However it is something I've thought about before, what happens to societies when no one dies, whether we'll keep the same customs and societal opinions forever, etc.

You might enjoy Kurt Vonnegut’s short story 2BR02B. The Wikipedia article[1] has links to several different places you can read or listen to it for free. (Though I’m a bit confused as to how his work is already in the public domain since he only died relatively recently?)

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_B_R_0_2_B

It may have been published without a copyright notice? As it was published between 1927 and 1977, that would explain why it's in the public domain: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Hirtle_chart

Death and fusion will both be solved instantly once super human AI arrives.

Possibly because it will kill us all immediately but maybe it will solve those things for us.

You know what they say, give a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.

i think you're a little off the mark. Google Aubrey de Grey. Ageing isnt that tough of a problem

> Then what happens as humans solve aging and no one dies?

Then everything will change. Concepts like copyright would end up irrelevant.

Melancholy Elephants, a Hugo-winning short story, answers that: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

I'd be fine with the extension path, but in exchange I'd expect a fee that increases with each extension. Almost like a land value tax but for IP.

That's a really interesting idea!

Perhaps the fee would be a base per times renewed plus the worth of a portion of the total reported wealth that the IP has generated over it's lifetime, instead of just since the last renewal. So if you've made sixty thousand dollars over the first twenty years, you owe six thousand for the renewal. If you've made ninety thousand dollars over the next twenty years, you owe ten thousand dollars plus eighteen thousand for the renewal. The base fee scales to make it feasible for low earners, but increases to prevent copyright abusers from perpetually milking an unused IP like how Harmony Gold did with Robotech/Macross for thirty eight years.

Harberger taxes on ip could be neat

This to me is the right answer: have an intellectual property tax which goes up every year. Disney can pay to keep Mickey locked up but all of the less popular IP shifts the calculation from “keep it, we might use it some day” to a more balanced calculation.

The other thing I’d like to add is some kind of requirement that works be available (e.g. it should cost a lot more if they want to hide it in a vault) but that would need care to avoid publishers screwing creators if there’s a dispute, as is not uncommon - you wouldn’t want the threat of putting something in the public domain to be used to force the creator to agree to unfavorable terms. Maybe something like all assignment contracts are unconditionally voided without compensation if the company chooses not to make an item available for sale/license at standard rates for more than n days in a 5 year period?

I like your idea a lot, but I'll admit I don't know what a standardized rate or one-size-fits-all solution looks like. Or, I have different expectations for HBO than I do for an individual artist producing works as a hobby.

I also wonder about the implications for the copyright status of a "limited edition" version of a work. I'm not sure how that would play out.

Yeah, there would definitely need to be some thresholds for things like lifetime revenue and use (e.g. you wouldn’t want a service trying to play silly games pretending that they didn’t collect revenue for a movie because it’s a complimentary to their members with some other purchase).

Limited editions are interesting, especially if they’re not something easily compared to a mainstream release. Maybe you’d need an appeal process where someone could get a special exception by the Copyright office under certain circumstances.

Disney gets blamed a lot for this, but I don't really buy it. The copyright extension in '76 brought America into the same copyright duration as stipulated by the Berne Convention of 1886 (although the US would not sign on until a decade later), and the Sonny Bono act extended copyright length to the same as what had been harmonised in the EU a few years prior; Germany had had notoriously long copyright lengths, lasting 80 years past the death of the author at one point.

Don't get me wrong, copyright length is certainly too long, but blaming Disney is rather Americentric, considering the US was rather late to the game on long copyright durations.

Another point against the Mickey Mouse theory is that the trend ends on January 1st, 2024. Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain.

That's assuming there's no other extension :-)

There is no "95 years after publication" rule in the EU, so you cannot say the Sonny Bono act was a "harmonization".

Wikipedia also states (with some sources), that "Since 1990, The Walt Disney Company had lobbied for copyright extension." It was in their best interest, they had the money, so no surprises there. I'm sure they weren't the only ones, but the largest, for sure.

True, although in this case the US law is perhaps better than the EU one; the EU lacks any exceptions for works of joint authorship, including works for hire, so it's 70 years from the death of the last surviving author, which would usually exceed 95 years.

Or, beyond 28 years, if the work is not released to the public domain, have an annual copyright tax based upon a "fair market" assessment of the property. To keep assessment real, perhaps let there be an auction starting at 2x the taxed value.

Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing?

Right now, especially without registration required anymore, there is no burden to owning copyrights "passively". If they had to enumerate and price them, that alone may make it worth shedding some of them.

> Wasn't there a variation of that done for some property taxes: you could assess your own property, but they reserved the right to buy it at the assessed price, discouraging lowballing?

I've come to the conclusion that this sort of property tax (on everything, including land, equipment, trademarks, and copyrighted material) is the only kind of tax that actually makes sense economically. Fundamentally, "property" is one person or entity taking something from society as a whole (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence); "taxation" is its natural inverse: society as a whole taking something back from a person or individual (backed in the end by society-sanctioned violence). There's a pleasant symmetry that the people who have benefit the most from the setup of society should be the ones who fund it; and that in a sense, ownership must be continually "justified".

No extensions. The moment you allow extensions you get corps. like Disney.

10 years is more than enough in the current landscape of the Internet and the creator-driven economy/

Mickey Mouse is a registered trademark, copyright law isn't even relevant.

I'm actually surprised corporations aren't lobbying for this. Instead of coming up with original ideas, they can just take any works of art pre-2000 and just recycle them over and over.

Why spend billions buying Marvel when you can do it for free, why spend billions for parts of the LOTR series, why spend billions to buy Lucas Arts.

I mean Disney is built on taking public domain works and reworking them into their own classics. Imagine if they could do that with the biggest cultural uptake in human history of the 1900s instead of the relatively unknown 1800s stories.

Don't forget streaming services like Netflix who shell out billions to get Seinfeld and Friends. Lobbying for 20 years means they get ALL the 90s instead of shelling out billions.

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