Also, we need to move towards a registration based copyright system. This post doesn't need copyright protection.
This idea seems very wrong to me, for two reasons. First, you might not deem this particular comment of yours worthy of copyright protection, but people might find themselves in different situations. Consider for example the following Reddit comments, don't they deserve copyright protection?
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/kkmm4/you_unexpec...
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k067x/could_i_des...
Secondly, a registration based system puts unsophisticated creators at a disadvantage. People who don't have the resources to register all their creations or lack knowledge of the procedures will be penalized.
I would be happy to live in a copyright-free society[1], as it would not favor anyone. But a registration based system would shift the balance even more to the advantage of big corporations and copyright trolls.
[1] As long as some moral rights are preserved, e.g. one cannot take credit for someone else's work.
I see the advantage of your system when coupled to an increasing price for maintaining registration (it would flatten the plot in the original submission). But I don't see the advantage over the solution of a short-term copyright: your system would basically keep out of the public domain important works that already benefited the content owners more than enough...
"your system would basically keep out of the public domain important works that already benefited the content owners more than enough." While true the exponential rise in cost in my proposition would lead to ensuring that these things will go into the public domain at some point. As it is now, extensions apply to everything including things for which no one cares for anymore.
Let's not ignore that the current system is also biased towards large corporations anyway. The cost of enforcing copyright is prohibitively high for small creators. I also suggest in a previous post to have a open databases showing registration (paid for by the registration fees) that would make it easier to find and contact creators to license their things.
In fact auto registration has shifted power towards the fewer.
The upside of automatic copyright is clear: you don't have to bother registering every blog post you write if you want to prevent people from copy-pasting them.
The downside is less convincing: tons of material "unworthy" of copyright are automatically protected? Well, who cares if I cannot copy some HN comment...
Who owns the copyright to the columns I wrote?
With a registration system, I could look that up. Now? I could republish the content and wait to get sued to figure out who owns it, but that's rather expensive.
This is a good example why a registration based system is bad: as a student you would likely not have bothered registering for copyright on your humor column, while in the present system you enjoy the protections and can republish as you like.
(If you had worked for a commercial newspaper, you would have created a work for hire and the newspaper would detain the copyright. I'm not sure what happens to copyright when the newspaper disappears but this is unrelated to copyright registration)
I'm on board with charging renewal fees for copyright, but you have to do it with a "five years after publication freebie" clause. I'm not going to file for protection on the 20 or so small projects I work on each year.
Keep in mind--lesser OSS projects will fall out of copyleft under this system, because now copylefters have the same fee structure that copyrighters do, but not the business model that goes with it. So, depending on your view of copyleft, this can be good or bad.
that way they won't want to set the value high to pay the fees...and not too low since then the licensing costs would be too low
Publishers would be only too willing to pay registration rates that independent creators could never afford. It would allow them to never pay original authors for their copyrights in favor of simply waiting them out and plucking the work out of the public domain once the creator had given up.
If you thought "work for hire" was bad today, imagine what it would look like if publishers all knew that independent creators were likely only a year or two away from not even having that copyright with which they currently negotiate.