[alexb_]

I've heard the suggestion that copyright could be extended after 5 years by paying a dollar to renew, after 6 years by paying 2 dollars, 7 years by paying 4, 8 with 8, etc.

If your copyright is so immensly valuable that it's worth paying to renew it, that's fine. The longer you keep something in copyright, the larger your harm to society becomes due to preventing legal fan works and derivatives from being made. The fee to renew would reflect that.

[tester457]

As long as the cost increase is exponential since companies like Disney can afford it, 9 years pay 16, 10 years pay 32, 20 years pay 32768, 30 years pay 16777216, etc.

[alexb_]

That's exactly what I was implying

[II2II]

Other benefits of this approach: registration would make it much easier to identify works out of copyright and it would be much easier for the public to reclaim abandoned works.

[endisneigh]

seems like a good idea - what's the downside?

[ghaff]

One downside of any sort of copyright registration requirement (probably especially one requiring ongoing renewals) is that it benefits corporations at the expense of individual creatives. Disney's lawyers are not going to forget to renew and the revenues involved mean that any registration is likely trivial. Not so for an individual author or photographer.

In fact, groups representing authors and photographers have opposed orphan works legislation in the past.

The US used to require affirmative action to gain copyright protection but this was phased out to be consistent with most other countries.

[alexb_]

> the revenues involved mean that any registration is likely trivial.

Over time, this would exponentially not be the case

[ghaff]

Even if it's ultimately untenable for even corporations to pay you've made it impractical for most individuals far faster.

Copyright applies from the moment of creation for all creative works in the US today. But registering, which as I understand makes it easier to collect damages, costs money (call it $100, the details are somewhat complicated). I probably wouldn't go through that for most things even today.

[wolpoli]

What constitutes 'work'. On one extreme, a studio spending millions making a movie is a single piece of work. On the other extreme, a photographer might take 100 photos in a day that he/she offers for sales. The number won't work for the photographer.

[coredog64]

Not OP, but I would imagine that the USG isn’t in a position to efficiently and effectively accept lots of small payments. Working from that premise, you’d probably optimize for taking advance payment for 8 years with some way to retroactively pay if your work is suddenly worth more than $20.