[Y_Y]

If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, but didn't have veto over publication, how bad would that be? The reasons people usually justify copyright protection usually centre on rewarding the creators, and I think the right to stop people seeing your work is a harder sell.

There is of course a new question of how to set the price, but you could e.g. have an auction of some kind where the highest bid must be accepted.

(There are certainly notable cases like Mein Kampf where copyright has been conspicuously used to prevent further distribution.)

[eru]

> If the copyright system were changed so that rightsholders were guaranteed to get paid, [...]

How much would they get paid? What if they wanted to hold out for more? Would every piece of copyrighted material be paid the same? Or would you normalise it per sentence or per letter? Or per frame in a movie?

[amanaplanacanal]

This has all been solved for music with compulsory licensing, so I assume we could solve it for video too.

[Mindwipe]

It really hasn't.

Try seeing how many Beatles songs you can include in another work that you distribute internationally and let me know how that goes.

[eru]

Also to a first approximation we can treat all music as roughly interchangeable and we can measure the 'amount' of music eg by runtime or by song, so compulsory licensing can set some arbitrary fees.

You can perhaps do something similar for video, but it's hard to do that for all copyrighted material. Eg for a video game a single sprite has a very different value than some modules in the game's engine.

[Y_Y]

I dunno man, did you see what I wrote a couple of lines down? There are ways of selling things that must be sold, I mentioned auctions, but also you can get independent assessments like in the case of compulsory purchase/eminent domain.

I'm sure you could object to some particular solution I propose, but people much smarter than me have studied this kind of game theory extensively and there are a lot of options.

The normalization can be the same as licensing is done now, "per work", negotiating specific usages needn't change, except that the seller has to allow that each covered work be subject to at least one must-sell auction per e.g. year. They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.

[eru]

> They can even win the auction themselves if all the bids are too low.

Does the auction have any teeth at all in that case? Just always bit an infinite amount of money, if you don't want to sell.

[Y_Y]

Maybe I should have said so explicitly, but in that case the seller would have to pay someone else, e.g. a common fund for promotion of the arts, or general taxation, or to the other bidders in portion to their bids to compensate them for not having any way to access the work.

Are you arguing that the idea is impossible in principle? The details will depend on what sort of incentives you want to end up with, but I can't see yet that there isn't some reasonable solution.

[eru]

You can probably come up with some messy compromise. But I'm not sure it's really much better than the existing system which already comes with fair-use constraints.

Or you could eg charge people a certain tax as a proportion of their self-declared value of the copyrighted material. (With the provision that they need to sell the rights to that material at the self-declared value to any comer or something like that.)

[nasmorn]

There is some system like this for music in Austria. I may record a new version of your song but it entitles you to a writers credit and some guaranteed amount of all revenue.

[eru]

> [...] some guaranteed amount of all revenue.

Is that a proportion of revenue, or an absolute amount? For the former, what if I give away the music for free?