[conception]

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.

[idle_zealot]

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.

[Andrex]

Giving large companies, but not the average Joe, the ability to retain copyright defeats the purpose of copyright being for artists.

[DrillShopper]

Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for a long time.

[JadeNB]

> Copyright has been about corporations, not artists, for a long time.

That doesn't mean that we should lean into it.

[ndriscoll]

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.

[ghaff]

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.)

[ndriscoll]

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.