The original US Copyright law extended protection for 14 years with the availability of renewal for another 14. I think that's reasonable and allows the expiration of copyright after 14 years if the owner doesn't take the time to renew.
I wouldn't even mind so much if extensions were potentially infinite. My real problem is that everything gets the maximum "protection" by default. Creative Commons was invented to let authors selectively give up overbearing "protections". We should make some of these opt-in instead of opt-out.
It seems like a sensible plan would be to charge $1 for copyright registration that lasts 5 years, then allow as many renewals for another 5 year period as you like but double the fee each time. At the 150 year mark Disney can decide for themselves whether another 5 years is worth a billion dollars.
How would this system operate on an international level? Whom would foreign creators pay to have their work copyrighted in the US? If you let everyone pay their country's government but still respect their copyright internationally then the country with the lowest fees will see a huge volume of copyright offshoring. If you make everyone pay each country separately then copyrighting one's work will suddenly become expensive for individuals and $properties not being registered on $island will be exploited.
You could just do it like they do for various taxes. You register in every country but you can deduct the fee already paid to another country from what you owe, so the total amount you pay is equal to the fee from the country with the highest fee that you've registered in.
It should be easy to automate this electronically to the point where you upload a copy of the work and check the box for every country you want to register in and it does them all at the same time.
Or you could just have every country charge the same fee and let people register in their home countries to much the same effect.
And I'm not sure what you're talking about with being exploited on $island. You can imagine about the same thing happening there as happens in countries that already don't have copyright enforcement, i.e. nobody cares because nobody there has any real money anyway. It's not like they can export to countries where the copyright is registered.
Agreed in principle. I think the initial slope should be a little lower but after about 30 years things should REALLY start to take off. So maybe $10 a year for the first 15 years and then double it every year thereafter.
Graph the two of them and get back to me. I'm talking about the slope. I do realize that the total sum is basically trivial either way. But slope is an actual mathematical term and I used it as such.
To pre-emptively deny the reform opponent (read "Disney lackey") the opportunity to scare monger people by trotting out the "it's exponential!!" argument.
If it's a flat fee for the first 15 or 30 years then it should take a lot of wind out of their sails.
If people start doing the math and saying "but at 60 years this is completely insane!" then just ask for a list of affected stakeholders that this would bankrupt. I suspect the only people on the list would be Disney.
I think five year increments might be a little short, but I agree with the general idea. One of the biggest problems with indefinite copyrights is that you wind up with big chunks of culture that get sucked up into this copyright black hole. They are too locked up to safely use, but it's difficult or impossible to tell why might actually own the rights. Then it's only a matter of time before large sections of our cultural past fade away forever.
"At the 150 year mark Disney can decide for themselves whether another 5 years is worth a billion dollars."
That's one reason that the plan would fail. One of the reasons I like explicit registration is that allowing these sorts of indefinite extensions for some works makes it less likely that companies would lobby heavily against the plans. By making it deliberatively punitive for these scenarios, you put the plan up against the same forces that are already fighting (and successfully, at that) for blanket copyright extensions.
It might not work the same. Disney's lobbying in this scenario would probably have to take the form of "We, a gigantic and highly profitable corporation, want to unfairly pay less money." I'd say this is less likely to work than the current "Protect the artists!" approach. Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough at how it could be spun.
I agree it should expire and require active effort (and some $ amount) to renew. That way, Mickey Mouse can still be under copyright but most other artistic works will be available for public use.
I'm opposed to regressive copyright charges - which this sort of arrangement could lead to. Perhaps a percentage of the gross of all items sold under the copyright could be charged. That way if I'm making pin money from a few ebooks I don't have to give up that money so that Disney can be charged [at least] the full cost of the registration/renewal?
One needs to write the law/regulations very carefully and be prepared to strike down extremely hard on corps who will try to manipulate this, eg by saying for a movie that the copyright work is on the DVD and you bought that for 1 cent but the packaging and label cost $19.99 and the work isn't available without those (or saying the customer pays for the TMs used separately or whatever other Hollywood accounting means they concoct).
Since Mickey Mouse has become an integral part of modern culture, at some point we should be able to do anything with Mickey we can currently do with the characters of Shakespeare and Grimm.
Or we could make it a gradual process using Creative Commons' layered licenses: Full copyright for 14 years, CC-BY-NC-NDSA license for next 14, CC-BY-SA for next 14 and CC-BY till the life of author and public domain thereafter.
To provide this case, make it "the maximum of [life of author, 10 years]".
IMHO 25 years regardless of author lifetime would be more than enough.