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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This hardly seems perpetual in practice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Hard to find the right balance, but what we have now is asinine.
That said I like the exponential scheme.
Works with little to no commercial activity should be protected longer to provide more opportunity to do so and give more protection to unknowns.
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.