[jlgray]

I always feel like the right solution would be to have a significantly shorter copyright duration, but make it extendable for a large and increasing annual fee.

I don't care if Disney gets to keep the rights to Mickey Mouse. The real problem is all the other stuff that gets swept along in the bargain.

[cwkoss]

+1

Annual fee starts at $10 and increases by 50% each year (or similar exponential growth function) would be wonderful.

Year 2 - $15

Year 10 - ~$380

Year 20 - ~$22k

Year 30 - ~$1.3M

Year 40 - ~$74M

Year 50 - ~$4B

[chrismorgan]

There are certain advantages to automatic copyright for individuals, and I don’t think that a short period is harmful. How about we say ten years of copyright protection on a work, then your $10 × 1.5 ⁿ ⁻ ¹ for each subsequent year.

[cwkoss]

Good pull request, merged to my local brain-repo :-)

[Spivak]

I like the plan in theory but what's the justification for charging these huge sums of money except to be punitive? Why does a work have to somehow perpetually make more money?

Why not have the lawyers show up in court and show that the company they represent is still actively using and making money on their copyright? If they are they get a, say 5 year, extension. Judges can use common sense to avoid shady behavior like manufacturing demand or trying to pass of a small number of sales as evidence and copyright holders aren't left with a huge bill.

[cwkoss]

I believe that private ownership of culture is a cost to our society, as it restricts the rest of society from being able to use, remix and adapt that work. That cost grows as the work becomes more pervasive in the cultural zeitgeist.

I think that owners of a work should repay a portion of this cost to society in return for a monopoly on that work.

In an ideal world, I'd prefer some sort of "property tax" on intellectual property: annual percentage of IP's fair market value due as tax or it's released to public domain. However, I worry this scheme would be too vulnerable to gaming and manipulation as it's hard to determine the fair market price of a monopolized product.

My proposed exponential renewal tax is somewhat flawed as 'cultural relevance' is only partially correlated with age of work. But, by increasing the cost of renewal each year, it would more closely model increased societal costs over time as private works become more pervasive and relevant in our culture. By imposing a time-correlated cost of retaining IP rights, it would incentivize IP owners to release non-profitable IP into the public domain instead of hoarding it.

[confounded]

Why even bother making it extendable? If the goal is to incentivize novel creations, I can't think why 20 years isn't very generous.

[fardo]

It respects the people in society who believe that, as long as a commercial work continues to make significant amounts of money, they are entitled to the profits of their labors.

It also respects the statistic that most creative works stop being commercially exploited within about 28 years [1]. A shorter default copyright allows society to reap the benefits of the default effect [2], in which a creator who is no longer interested in the sale of their work is psychologically more likely to just let the default option happen, which in a world with regular extensions of copyright would mean their work would enter the public domain and others could make use of their work.

It also forces creatives and companies to back up, with results, that they believe their works are, for their own benefit, worth denying the public access to. If a work deserves or needs more than 20 years of profit to justify its existence, fine, but your belief being backed up with a $20,000 deposit, and the knowledge that the cost to you is only going to go up from that point, speaks a lot stronger than just one's word.

[1] Average result of articles linked in https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/07/shorter-c...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_effect_(psychology)

[politician]

"Proof-of-Stake" as applied to copyright. I like it.

[SolarNet]

It's also the short benefit. If game companies abandon the IP and stop paying the money to maintain it, the community can continue to play it. As it is now, we will have to wait a hundred years to have rights to play some games. Even though the servers were taken down decades ago, and the companies have no intentions of supporting that software ever again.

[Spivak]

Copyright doesn't in practice prevent 3rd party game servers and copyright expiration won't suddenly enable them. We're dealing with mostly closed source games for which the server code was never released.

[SolarNet]

It does actually. Blizzard has successfully pursued legacy WoW servers because of their usage of protocols, and an imitation of their copy righted content.

[chrismcb]

Personally I think copyrights should be for 25 years. Based on the fact that it is almost impossible to find books older than 25 years old on Amazon ( unless they are in pd )