[mlyle]

It's nice to make works that no longer have commercial value enter the public domain by default.

Another justification: if the harms increase for giving an author exclusivity for a longer time, society should demand a larger payback. This may only be justified for the most prominent works

It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more, and then 100x for every 10 additional years. Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price, and then the price ramps steeply so that very few works are registered beyond 40 years.

A tiny proportion of works will be worth the $50k step, let alone the $5M one. Even Disney will not pay $5M for most things.

And, of course, things that are forgotten or devoid of commercial value will lapse at 20.

[shiroiuma]

I think only 5 years should be free, then maybe $100 for another 5, then exponentially increasing after that.

A lot of stuff simply has no commercial value after 5 years. This is for software, BTW; for movies or books, different terms might make more sense.

[magicalhippo]

I think that if a copyright is held by the creator, it's fine that it's longer. If it's inherited to a person then the age should be inherited as well, so the exponential fee kicks in as if the creator had lived.

If it's sold or otherwise acquired by a non-person (company or similar) the exponential fee should kick in immediately.

Something along those lines.

[bluGill]

A lot of things take more than 5 years to create. If save all your garbage and find the notes from your rough draft that you started more than 5 years ago does that mean your work is not copyright, merrily a derivative work? Some authors write a novel in 6 weeks, but others take years to polish it.

[shiroiuma]

>Some authors write a novel in 6 weeks, but others take years to polish it.

I think 5 years might be too short for a novel, but regardless, the lesson here is: don't publish your work until it's ready. Copyright protection should start when it's published, not when the first word was typed.

>If save all your garbage and find the notes from your rough draft that you started more than 5 years ago

Maybe there should be a provision about rooting through someone's trash? This seems a rather rare edge case.

[nordsieck]

> It feels a little out of calibration. How about free for 20 years; $500 for 10 more ... Everyone gets 30 years to exploit a work for a reasonable price

IMO, it's important to have a short default period. The vast majority of content - posts, comments, videos, tweets, open source software, etc. will never be registered. It's a huge benefit to get that into the public domain as fast as possible while still providing a reasonable period of exclusivity to creators.

If you're really wedded to the 30 year thing, I think an initial 10 years, and 20 years for the first registered period is a better balance.

[mlyle]

On the other hand, some kinds of work may not really make it to market inside the 10 years. It's all tough compromises.

I'm sure we can agree that we can definitely do better than what we have now, though. Let's not make perfect the enemy of good.

[nordsieck]

> On the other hand, some kinds of work may not really make it to market inside the 10 years.

My understanding is that copyright starts when the work is first fixed to a medium. Which means that intermediate versions shouldn't start the clock[1]. But I'm not a lawyer, so I could be totally wrong.

> I'm sure we can agree that we can definitely do better than what we have now, though.

100% concur.

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1. As opposed to the situation with medication and patents, where the patents are ticking down while trials are in operation.

[mlyle]

> Which means that intermediate versions shouldn't start the clock

No, but an initial time presenting a form of the work will. So, e.g. using the basis for a future textbook with your students starts the clock on those versions.

[Sakos]

Copyright was never meant to give perpetual rights, which is what your scheme would do (as it does now). So might as well not change the current system, because the conclusion is the same.

The final arbiter was never "does it have commercial value still?" until today. That's a purely modern perspective pushed by companies like Disney, because of course it is. That's all they care about. We don't have to care about that. In fact, I'd suggest it's completely immoral to accept that framing when we look at how important public domain has historically been to our culture.

[MacsHeadroom]

How many copyrights are worth half a billion dollars to register from 50-60 years? Presumably zero are worth registering for $50B to protect from 60-70 years.

This hardly seems perpetual in practice.

[mlyle]

> was never meant to give perpetual rights, which is what your scheme would do

Pretty quickly the cost to renew exceeds the amount of money in the world.

This scheme tosses the few powerful creators a small bone while shortening duration of all copyrights.

In addition to generating revenue from these large creators, and shortening their total term of protection... it also diminishes their power by creating a vibrant public domain with a whole lot of contemporaneous works in it.