[zie]

Except you forgot about competition within the movie making industry. They could very easily end up competing against each other by making 2 or 3 movies of the same thing, which lowers their overall return, and is a bad deal for everyone.

I think it just depends on the pricing the copyright holder wants. If you can pay a few bucks and get exclusive rights, it's totally a win. If you have to mortgage your business to get the rights, it's a much harder decision.

I think a reasonable compromise would be, by default a copyright lasts 10 years, but they can extend it another 10 or 20 years(or maybe even until their death), if they pay a fee of some sort, perhaps yearly, so the copyright will expire as soon as it doesn't make sense to pay the fee anymore.

This lets the long-term copyright winners continue to win for most of their lifetime, if they cut the people(the govt) in on some of that return. While most things that don't need long term copyright get dumped into public domain to help invigorate and make more awesome new ideas.

[PurpleRamen]

> They could very easily end up competing against each other by making 2 or 3 movies of the same thing, which lowers their overall return, and is a bad deal for everyone.

Public domain is not new. They already have this situation now, and usually avoid this, probably for exact this reason.

> This lets the long-term copyright winners continue to win for most of their lifetime

Seems not very reasonable to support the rich and paywall the poor.

[zie]

I agree public domain is not new, and they do have this problem today. It's generally 1st mover advantage that wins and the rest give up the project, since they know they probably can't beat them to market and get good market share. That's not always the case though.

If you are poor, then there is zero reason to renew the copyright, you clearly aren't making any money off of it. I view it as a tax on the copyright, it could even be implemented that way, say 10% of your take rate or something.