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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Nothing will ever enter the public domain while Winnie the poo is bringing in the billions.

Since long copyright term exists solely to protect media companies' IP brand families, there could be an exponential tax on copyright extension.

The first nine years of copyright are free. After that, you pay $100 to renew for the tenth year. At year 20, the price is $1000 / year. At year 30, the price is $10,000 / year, which is still perfectly reasonable for profit-generating IP.

The 70th year of copyright will cost a billion each year. At that price, it becomes a major board room decision whether to keep milking the same IP or rather come up with something new.

The profits from this tax could go to culture and education, similar to what is done with gambling profits in many European countries that have a state-owned gambling monopoly.

Ideas like this is what we need.

I'd like to upvote this twice.

I am generally very anti-copyright ( I hold that ten- to twenty years should be enough for the creator/their family) but I really like this exponential tax proposal.

That's an odd shifting of the Overton Window. I would generally think that someone who was anti-copyright would start from the position that copyright shouldn't exist at all. And that someone who was very anti-copyright would be actively protesting against the law.

It's a compromise. If copyright really is so important to your business model, then you can afford to pay for the extension. Once it stops bringing in money, it becomes public domain within a decade.

As it is now, all art that does not generate money is forgotten and remains inaccessible forever.

In particular, there's a ton of interesting non-fiction (eg, niche history books containing original research) that's out of print but not out of copyright.

Nobody benefits from this. If we had a reasonable "orphaned works" law, the internet could contain much much more useful information.

Or, more likely, publishers would allow print-on-demand ordering of any book in their collection.

Either way, it's win-win.

Life of the author unless the author dies within 20 years of start of initial copyright in which case immediate family can extend by 20 more years, giving offspring, spouse etc, a chance to gain income from a deceased's work. (i chose 20 years because that would be baby to adult in the case of offspring).

Companies: 20 years then stfu. Remember, they can still sell their product, and they could come up with a scheme to mark it original or authentic, like wines and foods now do.

About companies this is what I think: If Mickey Mouse goes off copyright, sure there would be copycats making Mickey toys and not paying royalties/fees.

Possibly somebody non-Disney approved would be making a Mickey Mouse movie.

However, Disney could still be certifying approved toys(Nintendo seal worked quite well, there were non Nintendo cartridges but they were hard to find and generally horrible , I was tinking Custer's Revenge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer%27s_Revenge but that was a non Atari approved cartridge).

And if someone can make a new Mickey movie that stands along Fantasia then more power to them is what I say. Disney has been sitting on Mickey laurels for too long.

Atari didn't approve cartridges. That's exactly how something like Custer's Revenge got made.

Nintendo didn't just approve cartridges by attaching a sticker to them, there was a protection chip inside (sold to the manufacturer by Nintendo) that allowed access to the NES. The reverse-engineering of this chip led to lawsuits:

https://goo.gl/Cy736g

You're conflating trademark and copyright. They're two different things.

The copyright on Steamboat Willie expiring means that the cartoon, Steamboat Willie, falls into the public domain. That doesn't mean that anyone can make "copycat" Mickey Mouse toys, infringing on Disney's trademark.

You are correct, but then there is even less sense for Steamboat Willie to be still copyrighted (besides the obvious use in opening credits of recent Disney features, which the cynical me thinks is some attempt to extend the copyright protection not just a homage to the humble beginnings).

If the MM toys still have trademark protection why shouldn't Steamboat Willie go to public domain?

I would assume it's Disney's position that copyright terms should be indefinite. Such a policy allows them to indefinitely extract rents from the "assets" of "intellectual property" that their earlier works represent.

I don't agree with the position, morally, but from a purely practical perspective it makes sense that they'd want to maintain the value of these assets ad infinitum.

The flip side of this is that the boardroom decision will come down to can the billion dollar tax be passed onto the consumer or competitors? If you apply that to some other forms of IP like patents, the answer is "quite possibly yes"

The individual creative will relinquish copyright after 20 years, even if they're still hoping somebody might one day make a film out of their work and are kinda keen on having some sort of creative control. On the other hand, Disney will potentially still be shifting enough videos and merchandise to be renewing copyrights up to year 49. It's not exactly unprecedented for major studios to create high value brand families out of 20 year old books either, but in this case they'd rarely need to cut the author in on the profits.

Other than the revenue raising potential, that actually seems worse than the current situation for skewing copyright in favour of the brand families.

I like our german version "Urheberrecht". It is different from copyright because it cannot be transfered. Some comic character cannot be owned by a corporation which milks it for decades and centennials. An author can only give a licence to a company.

I always wonder what really happens whenever I transfer copyright for my papers to some publisher. It probably has no effect here in Germany, but is it valid in the US? Then I also wonder if TTIP might change anything about this?

Oh, please. That's a distinction without a difference unless you're saying that German authors can't hire legal representation or assistants and must actively negotiate and manage each license solo.

The distinction is that once the author dies the work falls into the public domain. For as long as they are alive they can license it to a company, and the company can defend it or do whatever, but when the owner dies the copyright dies with them.

I don't see how that can be possible. The Berne Convention established a minimum of 50 years after death and the EU harmonized to 70 years after death.

Some parts can not be transferred, but others can, particularly usage rights (publishing etc.) and licensing happens all the time.

It's a great idea - if IP is property, it should be taxed like property - but then you realise how few places have a property tax because property-owning money dominates the political process.

Are those fees 'per work'? Is it one fee per episode of a TV show? One fee for every issue of the New York Times? You'd be incentivizing IP creators to combine as much content into one conceptual 'work' as possible.

Bring it closer to home. Would it be one fee per source-file in, say, the Linux codebase? Much of that code is over 20 years old. When you modify one of those sourcefiles, you're creating a new derivative work which has its own copyright date and author, so do you need to pay to extend copyright on every version of every file, lest they fall into the public domain and then lose the protection of the GPL?

Every new update under GPL get's it's own copywrite date. So, having a 20 year old Linux codebase enter the public domain would do little.

I like this thinking.

I think this was Larry Lessig's position at one point. I think it's a a nice, practical solution that acknowledges that copyright is a political animal - let Disney keep Mickey forever, but the public gets everything of a lesser order of magnitude in value faster.

The problem with copyright is one of corruption, which a copyright tax does not solve. At the point of billion dollar renewals the board decision becomes, "How can we best spend our marketing and lobbying dollars to gain an exemption to or remove this tax?"

It also is very imbalanced. The average IP holding corporation will be much more able to pay $1000 or $10000 fee to hold onto a copyright, as well as able to determine which copyrights will be profitable in the future. They are also better able to leverage marketing power to make content profitable more quickly.

In contrast the average individual content creator is more emotionally attached to a work, less able to pay fees, and less able to market it effectively in order to make it profitable so he or she can afford the fees.

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