It would kickstart innovation, settle fair use of training data, and protect the internet archive.
On the downside: companies (not artists) would make a bit less rent-style income.
So even the downside is a win, in my book.
This results in highly profitable media still being in copyright, but basically everything falls out somewhere close to the year 25 1m renewal mark, or soon after.
Also, you have to give a few master copies to the copyright authority, so that it's less likely for the media to become lost.
I think a lot of people would consider it unfair
You hold on to.copyright of.a song you sang when you were 8 and isnt making any money? So what ?
But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.
Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.
Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.
The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.
On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/05/13/why-did-the-unite...
20 years for trademark is negotiable. That there needs to be an expiration date is not.
The problem I have is with trademarks being used as nouns but somehow not becoming generic. I searched "Velcro" on Amazon.co.uk. The best selling item is Velcro branded "Stick On". What even is a "stick on"? No reasonable consumer would identify that as a hook and loop fastener without context. "Hook and loop" isn't even written on the front of the packaging. The "Velcro" trademark is clearly functioning as a noun, which means from an ethical point of view it should be generic.
Well, small and mid-size businesses are easy to miss if you work from home or live in a big city. They don't wield anything like the kind of power you describe. But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs. You may want to stop and consider the value of multi-generational family-owned businesses.
wrong again, small businesses do not account for even 45% of US gdp. sorry to hear your jet ski rental isn't doing well
You'd have to be seriously arrogant to believe that your labour should support multiple generations of your family.
I don't have any copyrights or trademarks or anything, but if I did I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo who only wants to use my work to pad their own wallets.
Those aren't the only two options. If your copyright expired after a few years, your work would simply go into public domain, freely accessible to anyone. (The ones to "reap its benefits" at that point would be the general public.)
> Why?
The amount of money a single person spends throughout their lifetime generally orientates itself on the amount of money a single person earns throughout their lifetime. (We earn significantly more than 50 years ago, but we also spend a lot more, because our standards rose accordingly.)
If you expect your money to support the lives of multiple people (generations even), you are implying that your labour is worth multiple times as much as the labour of others. That is arrogant.
(I don't claim it should be actively prevented to make such large amounts of money. But we shouldn't legally limit people's access to literature just so a few authors can create a dynasty.)
Five years is a bit too short. Maybe five years automatic and then require renewals up to 25 years. It’d be good to have different terms for different types of things: software should be shorter, films or books should be longer terms.
Trademarks have to be renewed already. Why make them eternal?