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by autoexec
1280 days ago
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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. |
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