Ehhh, that just lets the already rich/famous keep their monopoly on popular culture. Perhaps it needs to be an inverse of how much revenue it's already brought in?
The status quo is the extreme that every author gets ~100 years of copyright protection automatically for free. A proposed extreme is to get up to 28 years for free.
The problem I see is that under both alternatives mentioned above, there is no way to express the intensity of preference / how badly an author wants protection. Also, authors receive the benefit of copyright protection without paying anything to society. This is why I proposed an escalating cost - the longer the protection, the more you pay. And it's essentially impossible to win against an exponential in the long run. Can Disney really afford to pay $100M per title to renew for the tenth decade? Or $1B per title for the eleventh decade? Or $10B per title for the twelfth decade? And if you don't like these numbers, you can choose whatever initial value and multiplier you want, e.g. $3, $90, $2700, $81000, $243000, etc.
In a way, I'm proposing something ideologically similar to quadratic voting, where the more intensely you want your preferred outcome, the more you have to pay to society to vote this way.
> Perhaps it needs to be an inverse of how much revenue it's already brought in?
You'd either have to make it so prohibitively expensive that almost no one could afford to renew (at least not more than a couple of times) or it would have next to no impact at all on companies with billions to spend. The disparity between what a random bedroom musician or amateur artist could afford and what Disney can afford is so great that the impact of renewal fees for a single person would never come near the impact for a corporation. What makes Disney so special that they should be given preferential treatment?
The answer to "how badly an author wants protection" will almost always be "very badly" at least while a significant amount of people are interested in the creative work in question. Maybe instead of worrying so much about what the billion dollar corporations want it would be better to set a default, but make the copyright term for a work shorter according to how much the public wants to access it (as measured by sales). It's the public's interests that copyright was created to serve after all.
To be honest though, all of that seems needlessly complicated. I think it'd be better and much more fair to just set a solid cut off of X number of years that applies to everyone equally no matter how much money they have. That'd also mean the public doesn't have to do so much to try to figure out when each individual work's copyright expired. If they know something was released longer than x number of years they know in every instance if it's available for them.
Ideally, we'd make everyone register for copyright protection by sending a DRM free copy of their work to the state who will automatically release it online at copyright.gov as soon as the copyright expires. Then everyone can just go there to see what's available and access anything they want. Kind of like a less curated. but more accessible Library of Congress.
nayuki|3 years ago
The problem I see is that under both alternatives mentioned above, there is no way to express the intensity of preference / how badly an author wants protection. Also, authors receive the benefit of copyright protection without paying anything to society. This is why I proposed an escalating cost - the longer the protection, the more you pay. And it's essentially impossible to win against an exponential in the long run. Can Disney really afford to pay $100M per title to renew for the tenth decade? Or $1B per title for the eleventh decade? Or $10B per title for the twelfth decade? And if you don't like these numbers, you can choose whatever initial value and multiplier you want, e.g. $3, $90, $2700, $81000, $243000, etc.
In a way, I'm proposing something ideologically similar to quadratic voting, where the more intensely you want your preferred outcome, the more you have to pay to society to vote this way.
> Perhaps it needs to be an inverse of how much revenue it's already brought in?
This could lead to phony movie accounting though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIoDfWgbVgU
autoexec|3 years ago
The answer to "how badly an author wants protection" will almost always be "very badly" at least while a significant amount of people are interested in the creative work in question. Maybe instead of worrying so much about what the billion dollar corporations want it would be better to set a default, but make the copyright term for a work shorter according to how much the public wants to access it (as measured by sales). It's the public's interests that copyright was created to serve after all.
To be honest though, all of that seems needlessly complicated. I think it'd be better and much more fair to just set a solid cut off of X number of years that applies to everyone equally no matter how much money they have. That'd also mean the public doesn't have to do so much to try to figure out when each individual work's copyright expired. If they know something was released longer than x number of years they know in every instance if it's available for them.
Ideally, we'd make everyone register for copyright protection by sending a DRM free copy of their work to the state who will automatically release it online at copyright.gov as soon as the copyright expires. Then everyone can just go there to see what's available and access anything they want. Kind of like a less curated. but more accessible Library of Congress.