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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> All copyright is way too long but authors go completely off-piste at anyone who suggests that it should be something more reasonable (I kinda like 21 years myself).

> Part of the issue is that the loudest voices are that 0.01% of authors whose work still has some commercial value decades after its creation.

My favorite scheme is that all copyright last for 10 years by default. You can register it for $100 for another 10 years. And every 10 years after that, the cost goes up by 100x. That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly.

Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked a bit, but I think the idea is fundamentally sound.

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This scheme seems to protect the largest companies with the largest bank accounts the most. Why would we want a system like that?

I actually have the opposite view: I'm more worried about a small-time author that say, makes living on a low-volume text or training book, than I am protecting Mickey Mouse.

It's nice to make works that no longer have commercial value enter the public domain by default.

Another justification: if the harms increase for giving an author exclusivity for a longer time, society should demand a larger payback. This may only be justified for the most prominent works

It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more, and then 100x for every 10 additional years. Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price, and then the price ramps steeply so that very few works are registered beyond 40 years.

A tiny proportion of works will be worth the $50k step, let alone the $5M one. Even Disney will not pay $5M for most things.

And, of course, things that are forgotten or devoid of commercial value will lapse at 20.

I think only 5 years should be free, then maybe $100 for another 5, then exponentially increasing after that.

A lot of stuff simply has no commercial value after 5 years. This is for software, BTW; for movies or books, different terms might make more sense.

I think that if a copyright is held by the creator, it's fine that it's longer. If it's inherited to a person then the age should be inherited as well, so the exponential fee kicks in as if the creator had lived.

If it's sold or otherwise acquired by a non-person (company or similar) the exponential fee should kick in immediately.

Something along those lines.

A lot of things take more than 5 years to create. If save all your garbage and find the notes from your rough draft that you started more than 5 years ago does that mean your work is not copyright, merrily a derivative work? Some authors write a novel in 6 weeks, but others take years to polish it.

>Some authors write a novel in 6 weeks, but others take years to polish it.

I think 5 years might be too short for a novel, but regardless, the lesson here is: don't publish your work until it's ready. Copyright protection should start when it's published, not when the first word was typed.

>If save all your garbage and find the notes from your rough draft that you started more than 5 years ago

Maybe there should be a provision about rooting through someone's trash? This seems a rather rare edge case.

Copyright was never meant to give perpetual rights, which is what your scheme would do (as it does now). So might as well not change the current system, because the conclusion is the same.

The final arbiter was never "does it have commercial value still?" until today. That's a purely modern perspective pushed by companies like Disney, because of course it is. That's all they care about. We don't have to care about that. In fact, I'd suggest it's completely immoral to accept that framing when we look at how important public domain has historically been to our culture.

How many copyrights are worth half a billion dollars to register from 50-60 years? Presumably zero are worth registering for $50B to protect from 60-70 years.

This hardly seems perpetual in practice.

> was never meant to give perpetual rights, which is what your scheme would do

Pretty quickly the cost to renew exceeds the amount of money in the world.

This scheme tosses the few powerful creators a small bone while shortening duration of all copyrights.

In addition to generating revenue from these large creators, and shortening their total term of protection... it also diminishes their power by creating a vibrant public domain with a whole lot of contemporaneous works in it.

> It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more ... Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price

IMO, it's important to have a short default period. The vast majority of content - posts, comments, videos, tweets, open source software, etc. will never be registered. It's a huge benefit to get that into the public domain as fast as possible while still providing a reasonable period of exclusivity to creators.

If you're really wedded to the 30 year thing, I think an initial 10 years, and 20 years for the first registered period is a better balance.

On the other hand, some kinds of work may not really make it to market inside the 10 years. It's all tough compromises.

I'm sure we can agree that we can definitely do better than what we have now, though. Let's not make perfect the enemy of good.

> On the other hand, some kinds of work may not really make it to market inside the 10 years.

My understanding is that copyright starts when the work is first fixed to a medium. Which means that intermediate versions shouldn't start the clock[1]. But I'm not a lawyer, so I could be totally wrong.

> I'm sure we can agree that we can definitely do better than what we have now, though.

100% concur.

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1. As opposed to the situation with medication and patents, where the patents are ticking down while trials are in operation.

> Which means that intermediate versions shouldn't start the clock

No, but an initial time presenting a form of the work will. So, e.g. using the basis for a future textbook with your students starts the clock on those versions.

Numbers can be tweaked but it adds up quickly.

Protect for 40 years for a million? Sure. Probably worth it for mega IPs

50 years for $100m? Still doable but it really starts to hurt.

60 for $10B? Maybe Pokemon and Mikey mouse can justify it, but very very few.

By 70 years it's simply not worth it.

>This scheme seems to protect the largest companies with the largest bank accounts the most. Why would we want a system like that?

Because the small time authors really won't care in 20 years anyway. Even if the cost to renew is a pittance. Are there authors trying to sell the copyright to a failed IP in 30 years?

My friend was getting royalty cheques 30 years after creating a song (slightly different from books) and the money mattered to him. The amounts were small and probably not worth any paperwork nor the risk of prepayment (paying for extension) which might not get back.

Hard to find the right balance, but what we have now is asinine.

I'm sorry, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. Your friend takes this money and goes have a haircut, the person cutting their hair won't be making money for the haircut 30 years later. Okay, we can give some extra benefits for intellectual property, but 30 years is way too much.

Heck even something absurdly low like 1$ per year would already be enough to salvage all those works from bankrupted companies that will lapse on payment. There are so many IP in limbo because their ownership is fragmented, unclear, or forgotten and having a payer renewal fees would clear up a lot of that real fast.

That said I like the exponential scheme.

They’re not protected—they’re made to pay to keep the work out of public domain. The deepest pockets will likely pay the most.

It's realistic to be adopted cause it acknowledges the takeover of democracy by buisness. What good is a policy, when it in implementation a maiden pure but has no chance in hell to become real? Purity signals are useless, when constructing the signal network that runs society.

Exactly. Works that generate massive amounts of commercial value are therefore more culturally important and should fall out of copyright faster, to maximize the amount of creative derivatives that can be produced while it's culturally relevant.

Works with little to no commercial activity should be protected longer to provide more opportunity to do so and give more protection to unknowns.

Large corporations won't bother to protect something that can't pay the 100x increase - Do you think Activision would have paid for Infocom rights if it cost 200K at this point? Maybe yes, but quite possibly not. But Harry Potter and Lord of Ring owners likely would, no matter whether they are small or large. This money could go to other services, such as education.

For small-time authors, why should they enjoy the intellectual property rights for the rest of their life? The vast majority of people need to keep working to keep generating money.

I like the idea but would tie it to a yearly revenue + total for receiving entity and cut those in periods (10 years maybe less) in a form like:

Free, 1% of revenue, 10% of revenue, 100%, 1000% etc.

Thus non commercial darlings could be kept relatively long without high cost but all commercial offerings would wither off relatively quick. Pipe dream as obviously companies in power are controllers here.

> That way commercial works that are very economically valuable can be protected for a pretty long time, but everything makes it into the public domain relatively quickly.

But wouldn't we want the valuable works to enter the public domain faster than the worthless works?

Once the free period expires, start at $1, then double each year.

> Once the free period expires, start at $1, then double each year.

That's going to create a lot of paperwork for not much value. Much better to have 10 year extensions. Your pricing scheme is functionally equivalent to starting at $2000 for 10 years, and increasing the cost by 1000x for each additional 10 years.

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