[jedberg]

> But if I create something without expecting it to be successful why shouldn't that be protected on the off chance it does end up being successful?

Copyright is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking. If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.

[bdowling]

> Copyright is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking.

Copyright encourages creative risk taking precisely by protecting the economic interests (e.g., profits) of those creative risk takers.

> If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.

People don't take risks when there's zero possibility of reward. Even people who create mainly for themselves would be demoralized by the idea that even if they were successful, anyone could just take and exploit their work.

[jedberg]

Then they can just register their work. Make the first five years free or even 10.

The point is registration won't affect creative output.

[bdowling]

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Processing registrations and maintaining a registry has significant costs. In 2019, the US Copyright Office made 547,837 registrations and received about $35 million in total fees. [0] In 2019, the Registrar of Copyrights asked Congress for a budget of $92.9 million. [1]

Currently, most works are only registered when owners have an actual infringer that they want to assert statutory damages against, or when a work is a commercial work that will certainly be infringed. If mandatory registration were enacted, the Copyright Office would need to handle hundreds or thousands of times as many registrations.

Even an impossible 1000x expansion of registration capacity wouldn't come close to being able to register everything that people would actually want to protect. For example, a user on Quora [2] estimated that 100 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day. Even if registration were free and streamlined, the yearly capacity of a 1000x Office would be saturated by 5 days of Instagram photos alone.

If registration were mandatory, commercial producers of creative works would not be affected because they would quickly learn to register everything. Ordinary people who don't want their Instagram photos to be exploited by others for profit, however, would lose. Opportunists who want to use the works of others without paying would win.

So, even if mandatory registration didn't affect creative output, it would be ridiculously expensive and would upset who wins and who loses in a way that would be counter to the public interest. It's never going to happen.

Goals in copyright policy should be addressed narrowly. If you want more works to enter the public domain, then you adjust the copyright term. If you want people to be able to use apparently-abandoned works, then you make apparent abandonment a defense to a claim of copyright infringement. If you want to expand Fair Use, then you amend the statute. Mandatory registration, however, would be a dramatic change that would upset everything; it's not worth discussing and I regret spending so much time on this response.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2019/ar2019.pdf

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/about/budget/2020/senate-budget-te...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-being-uploaded-on-...