Copyrighted and then falls into the public domain after 14 years. Plenty of time to monetize, then benefits the public after a relatively short people of time.
Or you get 10-14 years for free and after that you pay for it and it gets more and more expensive the older it is. Disney can keep their mouse but after 90 years its 100M. 91? 105M. Etc. If it’s not worth the price, let it go.
This makes sense from a purely economic perspective (if you scale the fee exponentially). It does not make sense from a "promote the arts" standpoint. Derivative works are a huge portion of human expression, and allowing the most valuable/influential ideas to be kept from the public would continue (albeit to a lesser degree) the creative harm of the current copyright regime.
It shouldn't be completely free for the initial period. Require a nominal fee (and registration) to pay for escrow/archive storage so it can be properly released into the public domain when copyright expires.
Registration basically benefits large corporations. There are good reasons why a lot of individual authors oppose orphan works legislation. Disney isn't going to forget or screw up copyright registration. You or your kids might.
Totally in favor of shorter copyright terms though even where there are edge cases where longer terms seemingly have made sense. (In terms of promoting progress of the arts, etc. or whatever the language is, I'm not sure that usually fairly small inheritances qualify.)
Registration benefits the general public, who are the meant to be the beneficiaries of the whole scheme in the first place. The entire purpose is to generate a larger wealth of public domain material. Registration and escrow ensures this happens.
What if copyright expired in 18 months? Same thing.
14 years made sense when there were wooden printing presses and the fastest communication was a rider and a horse carrying a handwritten letter sealed in wax. They arguably need less time to monetize today than they did back then. Years-long (or, as it is now decades-long and centuries-long) periods are about giving someone the right to tax culture for many generations, not about incentivizing creativity. It undermines the public domain.
18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17… I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again and I suspect a large fraction of people would react similarly.
5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value on most works and yet not hampering cultural remixes.
>18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17
Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now.
But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care.
>I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a
Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling.
>5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value
You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.
> Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience.
Ethics
> You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit.
The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.
After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.
Producing books without a profit motive requires some other means to support the vast time investment. Thus robbing the world of great works from those lesser creatures who still need to work for a living.
The only loss is competition drowning out the works of well off but talentless people. We’ll get vanity projects either way, what we lose is however irreplaceable.
There are a lot of profits in the industry, but as I think you're alluding to, not a great proportion of those profits go to the creators.
I want a model where I can compensate artists and creators (up to and including producers) equally to (or better than) the distribution and marketing arms. This can be cobbled together in some cases, but not simply.
> not a great proportion of those profits go to the creators
That’s often stated but misses the underlying reality is that the money is mostly spent on things which increase revenue. An unadvertised movie means less people pay for tickets, remove it and there’s less to go to everyone else.
> equally to (or better than) the distribution and marketing arms.
Obviously there’s fat to be cut from these industries but being a self published author isn’t some shortcut to success and would become even harder with very short copyright terms.
Some authors are finding success on Patreon etc, but it further limits the talent pool by requiring more than just being a good writer.
It takes more than 18 months for many good works to get through all the editing processes. You can tell when publishers skip on that time as the quality is worse.