10-year extensions with graduated costs. You get first 10 years upon publication, for free automatically, or for a nominal filing fee to register your claim. The next 10 years costs (extending to 20 total) now costs a meaningful fee. Maybe a fraction of sales structured like a license owned by the public/government, maybe a known schedule of fees based on the type of work, but either way it is a non-trivial sum. Then at 20, 30 and 40 there are further extensions each with higher costs, stopping at 50 years total. The copyright isn't tied to the creator's lifespan. Maybe we extend from my proposed 50 to 70 years to match current expectation, so Mickey gets protected (or would have) but there is a social benefit that gets shared.
Personally, I think this is the best solution I've heard. It still has problems in that copyright holders need to be proactive and it punishes work that can't pay the copyright extension fee that doesn't become popular until later but I think these are reasonable compromises to make to serve the larger good.
I haven't figured out a way to push this narrative in any meaningful way. People have a hard time distinguishing arguments against copyright from arguments for copyright reform. Most of the time I have to stress that I'm not for copyright abolishment but more reasonable copyright terms and extension protocols.
> it punishes work that can't pay the copyright extension fee
One tradeoff is to have the fee be proportional to the revenue it is generating. But this could encourage extension-by-default, rather than making it an intentional decision the copyright holder has to make: Is it worth "buying the monopoly rights." I think I would be ok with that if the increase for future extensions was steep. But that does also come at the cost of the second part,
> that doesn't become popular until later
You have a small-time creator that doesn't extend, and so loses out on massive potential revenue derived from future popularity of the work decades later. This would be unfortunate ... but on the other hand I think society would be more likely to make this true and create interesting derivative works if there were more works that were derivable. You need to keep durations short to make that happen.
Copyright is a right. Having to pay for it sounds absurd.
I have a much simpler solution: copyright terms are fourteen years from date of publication. There are no extensions.
It could even be a lot shorter nowadays. Nearly all media gets nearly all of its profit in the first year. A lot of commercial software goes out of date in a few months rather than yearly releases.
Not if you're still making money off of the work. But if you're not making money off of it, it's an incentive to let the copyright expire. Corporations might sit on things that they're not making money off of in order to try to make money off of them later, but they'd be limited to 50 years, which is a vast improvement.
Only for "non-profitable" works. It is a downside in the tradeoff. But even then the escalating price for extensions should offer an incentive to limit what works fall into this category and subsidize society when they do.
We are not just balancing the individual creators vs corporations, but also creators of derived works, and societies benefit at-large of more creative works in general. We want to maintain and compensate creators "enough" to maintain incentives for creation, but otherwise maximize the commons.
A decade or two tops. That is enough time to monetize your work. Then, you get out of the way and let others benefit from your work just as you benefited from the works of so many others who came before you. You're still free to keep creating new things.
Basically a modern version of the US Copyright Act of 1790. 14 year terms with an automatic 14 year extension if the work is still in print and was in print for say 10 out of 14 years of the initial term. If it isn't made available in the country, it isn't under copyright. If you "assign" your copyright to somebody else, you have the right to revoke said "assignment" at any time and reclaim your copyright. Publishers should only be allowed to publish under a license from the creator and should be banned from being able to steal the copyright to the work from the creator via deceptive contracts. Corporate copyright should only be allowed if the work was actually the work of the corporation rather than the work of an individual or unincorporated group of individuals.
Patent law would, ideally, be abolished altogether as I'm not convinced that other types of patents are any more legitimate than software patents. Trademarks should not expire, of course, but there should be restrictions on what you can trademark to protect the public domain (for example, the mouse corporation shouldn't be able to evade the copyright term limits by trademarking its characters).
Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it originally had.
Copyright is meant to be a "public pact" to encourage creation and innovation.
But think about that goal for a minute. It doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to create one awesome thing once and then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.
Instead, it should give you a reasonable amount of time to benefit from the fruits of it, but afterward, you should be encouraged to create again. So you'd be motivated not just by the carrot of making a lot of money over a 10-year span after launch, but also by the stick that you will no longer get royalties after 10 years, so you need to keep innovating. There is even a study out there that shows that the buyers of most books drastically drops after 10 years.
This benefits society at large, since it creates more competition, both from the original author of a work, but also by others who are then allowed to make iterations of the original work.
That's why patents are time-limited, too. The idea isn't to give one company the "right" to make money off an invention for eternity, but to allow the whole society to profit from it eventually by allowing others to drastically improve upon that original idea afterward.
But why was it ever intended as a "public pact" and not like an "actual right" that authors have? Because let's not forget that no idea is 100% original.
In fact, most aren't even 10% original. We all live "on the shoulders of giants" as they say. So most works are just rehashing of old works - so that also means that if enforcement was 100% the inflow of new works would drastically be reduced. So you don't "deserve" to benefit from a "new work" that's actually mostly rehashed old ideas anyway.
I always recommend watching the Everything is a Remix series to get a new perspective on this based on the history of copyrighted works:
You're dead-on-arrival. I vouched cause it was a respectful answer.
You probably should abandon this account and create a new one that isn't "dead" on post.
--------------
> Probably around 7-10 years, which is the time limit it originally had.
Samuel Clemens stated that if copyright was shortened to this long or shorter, then he would not issue books. Instead he'd public chapters as to restart the clock for each. And naturally, would arbitrarily lengthen copyright to however long he'd string readers by.
As for me, I have no answers. This problem is larger than I think anyone can view.
(It is interesting, as if you go back, mtgx has been banned since 2019 because of a "personal attack" on Carmack 100% is NOT personal and that, supposedly, their views are "predictable", which, if applied fairly, would get most of us banned as we are all broken records ;P.)
Regardless, that copyright was 7-10 years originally is close but not quite right in a way that matters: it was 14 years with the ability to request a 14 year extension. (This being the same in the US law which came much later, but was originally from the Statute of Anne in the UK.)
So like, 10 is close enough to 14 and yet, not only do those 4 years feel (to me) like they matter a lot, it is arguably 28, and 7 is definitely underselling the protection they were being granted. That said, it also only applied (in the US) to books, maps, and charts, so in some sense wasn't even the same, broad concept.
The discussion of how long over time is interesting as, in a very real sense, our ability to monetize copyright quickly has increased: the Internet lets you immediately address a nationwide market, while it easily could have taken decades with nothing but (expensive to use) printing presses making materials to distribute around using (slow) horses and (for even wider distribution) boats.
These days, I almost get the impression that a lot of media companies try to make the vast majority of money off of something in the first few MONTHS and then nigh-unto discard it entirely--not even bothering to finish things for later syndication--while they move on to new content and new IP.
They are then occasionally mining their old catalogs of IP to do like, a "reboot", but I frankly feel like no one would stop making content if they lost the ability to later do that, and I also doubt that the original creators are being compensated much for that later possibility (as it is so hit and miss).
> then benefit from it for life as a rent-seeking fat cat.
Instead the benefit of creative works would almost exclusively to middle-men who created nothing.
7 years is sooo short. Many TV shows and book series take longer than that from start to finish. And often times they grow in popularity.
Movies based on books frequently come out more than 10 years after the book resulting in a surge of popularity. With 10 years the original author would see no benefit from either the movie or their new book sales! There’d be a lot of fat cats, just not the actual creator.
