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?

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.

That's a really interesting idea!

Harberger taxes on ip could be neat