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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder if a good way to "reign in" on copyright abuse and abandonware is to require copyright holders to pay a tax based on some kind of formula.

More importantly: If no tax is paid, after a reasonable amount of time, (1-3 years,) the work is considered abandoned and automatically moved to the public domain.

Even more importantly, if the work isn't available for general consumption (rental and physical), at a reasonable cost, without a subscription / ads, no copyright claims can be perused for non-commercial piracy. (IE, it would become totally legal to torrent a TV show if it's stuck in a streaming service that requires ads / a subscription.)

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Georgism [1] but applied to copyright: If you want to extend your copyright past, say, 15 or 20 years, then you need to estimate the value of that copyright and pay tax on it. You can name any value you want, but someone can then buy it at that value.

Maybe there can be different rules for copyrights owned by humans vs corporations; 5 years free for corporations, 20 years free for humans. Or maybe longer for humans, I dunno. But having corporations sit on IP just because they can is ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

>If you want to extend your copyright past, say, 15 or 20 years,

If you want to extend your copyright past 20 years, too bad. Come up with something new; that one's public domain now. Or it should be at any rate.

I agree in principal.

That being said: I think reforming copyright should allow fair use and incentives for curation. There's nothing wrong with the Beatles' heirs curating the Beatles recordings for streaming, and remastering them; as long as there's no prosecution for torrenting needle drops of old Beatles records, torrenting rips of old Beatles CDs from the 1990s, and making a streaming service of such recordings (the old ones, not the remasters) without needing permission of the heirs.

Disagree. Individuals should have copyright for their entire lives. Not one moment past their death, but it's not cool to tell someone they can't sell the work they created any more.

They can still sell it if its in the public domain.

Just not exclusively.

You must not be familiar with how copyright works.

Most copyrights are works for hire and owned by a corporation.

Your proposal would only work for unpublished works, and self-published works.

Personally, once I think a work is made available to the general public, it needs to enter the public domain, or enter a period of compulsory licensing, after a predetermined period of time. It doesn't matter if the copyright is owned by an individual or a corporation.

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