What happens if grandma became disabled and is living off the residuals of her books 10 years ago published? Should old artists just die in poverty like the good old days then?
This is such an edge case that it makes me think that maybe copyright isn’t the solution that grandma needs.
And by their proposal, the first couple extensions would be extremely cheap. It could be a simple form on some copyright.gov website to register your work.
The edge case is actually quite common-- many authors mostly survive off their entire body of work, not just the works published recently. This was an issue in e.g. Disney, who refused to pay royalties to Star Wars books published many many years ago because they claimed to have purchased assets but not liabilities. One of the authors who was suing for royalties needed the money for cancer treatments. Bad look.
5k/work is not cheap. That's how much publishers may pay for a book. 15k/work is prohibitively expensive for books.
> One of the authors who was suing for royalties needed the money for cancer treatments.
Ok but what if the author had not written a successful book but still needed money for cancer treatment. Maybe we should handle social security and healthcare separately from copyright.
I would be happy to change the proposal so that the original author, and only the original author could pay for the extensions much more cheaply, if they have retained the copyright for its entire lifetime.
So any work for hire, or other aspect would be expensive to renew. Anything owned by a corporation, LLC, or other non humane entity would be expensive.
But if the original author has maintained control of the copyright since it’s inception, I’d be fine giving them a much cheaper renewal price.
This would encourage companies to take more, more frequent, and smaller bets while iterating rapidly instead of milking endlessly like we see with Disney. I like it. I still feel protected with my personal creative endeavors while corporations are motivated to move on their ip or lose it.
