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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

I feel it should be permissible to extend copyright indefinitely, so long as there is an extension fee, increased for each year of registration, without upper limit. Maybe first 35 years (~1 generation) free.

At year 36 you pay $100 to extend. By year 70 you're paying several million to extend. By year 90 you better hope that The Mouse is worth the twenty two billion dollars you owe.

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That's what it was like in the 19th century. If I recall correctly copyright law was established because of book publishers and the initial legislation had a default of 14 years before works passed into the public domain. After the 14 years publishers could extend the term by paying for it but each extension was only a couple of years. This unfortunately drastically changed during the second half of the last century when Congress was lobbied extensively.

I recommend reading Lawrence Lessig's book "Free Culture" which came out at the height of the file sharing craze in the 2000s. It explains perfectly how we ended up here and why it doesn't have to be this way.

Not a terrible idea, although it obviously penalises individual authors vs big business. I would argue that it should only apply to businesses and inheritors, so that an author could still behest his IP as a worthy inheritance. However, I fear it would result, in practice, in another immediate bonus extension for existing IP (i.e. the Mouse would continue to be owned by Disney for free until 2060). After all, it wouldn't be fair to tell a company they have to find an extra $22b per year from next January.

Yeah, the only way it remotely works in theory is if the fee is some percentage of the revenue you earned off the IP in the last year.

Practically it's an unenforceable nightmare that is so prone to "Hollywood accounting" type gimmicks that doesn't work at all.

I don't think making it a % works. If that % is less than 100, then you never have any incentive not to pay it.

Revenue != Profit. There are costs associated with making money off of the IP. You'd stop when those costs and the cost of renewing are greater than the revenue taken in.

Don't make it a percentage of revenue, just make it an exponentially increasing amount, and the copyright holder will bail out when it's no longer profitable for them.

Not a percentage. A dollar amount, increasing faster than inflation.

I think the point of the escalating fees is that it tells them to 'fuck off' once it gets to a ridiculous point and it traps them in their own rhetoric. "Our IP is valuable they say." But they won't pay by hundreds of millions let alone billions for their old stuff...

> I would argue that it should only apply to businesses and inheritors, so that an author could still behest his IP as a worthy inheritance.

I see that I didn't write clearly what I meant to write, which was 35 years after the original copyright-holder's death.

> After all, it wouldn't be fair to tell a company they have to find an extra $22b per year from next January.

Copyright laws have already been changed with retroactive effect, so it's not as though any troublesome precedent would be set in that area.

This still presupposes that the concept of copyright is justifiable...and it's not. People generated creative works for all of human history, long before the concept of copyright, and they did so by building upon the commons. Copyright is theft from the commons, stealing from us all and robbing us of works that may have been. All because some people profit from Imaginary Property (which often infringes upon your actual physical property rights...).

Cool, let's do the same for programmers then. everyone here no longer is allowed to copyright or trademark software or hardware. If you want to develop it, you work for free, and you can flip burgers or something to pay for it. Because you know, intellectual property is bad and all.

You see how stupid this is?

I'd wager that barely anyone here actually sells software.

I've never worked for a company that did.

Trade secrets are a different matter.

I realise my situation is not universal, but for me personally nothing much would change if copyright was abolished. All the software that I make public is open source and I make money by making software, not by selling licenses.

Any consequence for me would have to be indirect.

You've gone a bit far.

Function of hardware/software isn't covered by copyright anyway, unless you have a patent then people can recreate your hardware as long as they don't copy artistic features (non-functional box design, artwork, etc.).

Trademark serves a very important function for buyers/users in providing attribution of origin. Indeed IMO it should be strengthened to protect buyers -- anything with registered trademarks should have origin details publicly accessible so that the specific factory and third-parties involved are also flagged for buyers and not just the company that put a badge on it.

That said, I support copyright strongly, but the period should be more like 10 years unregistered + 10 more with registration.

Slightly aside of this: DRM is antithetical to copyright, works that can't enter the public domain should be denied protection; they break the contract with the public.

That system is open to adjustment through legislation, which means corporations and their lawyers will bribe politicians to benefit themselves and rapaciously loot the commons, just as they have in almost every other facet of society.

This is an example of the Nirvana Fallacy: it's not perfect, so it's worthless.

The argument is only ever between better or worse, not perfection and nothingness.

I quite like this scheme too.

One benefit you haven't mentioned. All in copyright works are centralised into one register so you can actually tell if something is copyrighted or not.

I'd go for an initially shorter period though. 10 years freely extendable for another 10 years? I suspect the majority of copyrighted works wouldn't even take up the extension. And allows people to do interesting things with that book that no one read that much sooner, for example.

what is the benefit to the public of this system? basically none. the value /lost/ to the public by protecting things that are still popular (nobody will pay to protect unpopular works...) easily exceeds $100.

So this sounds like a really uncompelling idea.

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