Tbh it would have been better if we just allowed corporations to continue paying to extend their own copyrights forever and everything that's no longer commercially viable or doesn't have an entity owning it just gets freed quickly.
I strongly disagree. And not just because copyright in perpetuity is unconstitutional. The value in a rich public domain is vastly under-appreciated. The default position is that IP is not protectable by law, because the free exchange of ideas is extremely important to modern society.
Certainly we have carved out exceptions to that default position, but only for very clear and distinct policy reasons. 1. consumer protection (trademark) and 2. incentivizing innovation and expression (patent and copyright).
The idea that my great-great-grandchildren might want to benefit from my having written a book really does not factor into whether I might write a book. If I'm not incentivized by life of the author + 70 years, I would probably not otherwise be incentivized.
Also, corporations don't pay to extend their copyrights. Other than the money Disney pays their lobbyists.
Yes, they should be able to pay a fee to extend beyond a fair time (~50 years?) based on a declared value of the work. To ensure the declared value is realistic, they then must sell the work to anyone that offers more than the declared value.
I couldn't possibly see how studios would abuse buying up rights to content and shelving them...
looks at the fiasco related to content being shelved at WB for tax write-offs
Under that model corporations could buy up content that should become public domain, depriving the public of rights to it, and get a tax credit for it :P
If the fees were set appropriately, it would be difficult to abuse.
Under this scheme, "High Noon" would be leaving copyright this year. If the fee was 5% and the current owners said it was worth $500k they would have to pay $25k to keep it. If you thought 500k was a lowball number, you can buy it from them and declare your own value (to where nobody would force you to sell it to them) and pay the fee based on that.
The work is then in the hands of someone with incentive to create economic value from it, and the public gets a royalty on giving you that privilege. A company that is just hoarding content that they're not making money on would have a hard case to make to investors.
The idea is specifically to solve the orphan works problem.
Practically speaking, life+70 is not that far off from perpetual copyright anyway. Nobody cares if a book published today will be escheated to the public domain in 2093, and very few works from 1927 are valuable enough to retain copyright today. In fact, it's so valueless that the vast majority of works still under copyright do not have public documentation of title. The only way to find out who owns these works is to get sued for pirating them.
So the idea is to create some kind of small formality that people have to jump through in order to retain ownership over a work, because vastly more works will hit the public domain even if it means Mickey Mouse will always and forever live in a cramped pet store cage shaped like a circle-C.
How to define "commercially viable" is... complicated. You can either make copyright fully pay-to-play to soak Disney, or you can err on the side of cheap renewals. I've also heard talk of sliding-scales based on taxable value of the property under copyright. I don't think it really matters as long as we have a reasonable process to strip orphan works of their copyright protection.
Mickey Mouse should be under copyright and Mickey Mouse should be taxed to an inch of his nasty rodent life are two separate questions and should be handled as such. A small fee should be fine (much less than the total cost of a patent, say) perhaps with a requirement to keep the work publicly available (print on demand and digital makes this relatively easy).
If the copyright makes more money than it costs to maintain, then it is financially viable. I often see this approach proposed alongside a renewal fee that rises each time it is renewed, so that works will eventually become too expensive to maintain copyright on and thus aren't held in perpetuity.
The law isn't making that determination, the entities paying to indefinitely extend its copyright are (presumably at exponentially increasing rates). If it isn't viable, they don't pay and the copyright lapses.
The copyright owner determines that. Put some price on renewal and let the owner decide if they want to pay it or not. For the vast majority of content, it's worthless after x years and they will just let it lapse.
We could then shorten copyright down to something like 20 years and anything still being sold or used can be renewed while completely obsolete gameboy games become freed.
Even if the fee was something like $10/year, probably the majority of copyrights would not be renewed.
