This is why copyright should only last for 20 years or so. Possibly extendable one time and one time only. As an absolute maximum.
When filing for a patent or copyright, say “I believe this is worth $1m” — so you pay a $20k tax on filing/renewing it. If you’re not confident that your idea can actually redeem 2% of that stated value, then maybe it’s too risky to actually be worth that much. So you say it’s worth $100k because you can definitely make at least $2k from it.
But if you’re really only confident in making $2k from your idea, and someone else is allowed to “buy license to use your material” at $100k, you’d be absolutely floored to make so much money from that idea. So if you end up being wildly successful, you’ve still made a lot of money (and can keep using your idea), but now competition/reuse is allowed past your stated value threshold.
As a society, we want land put to valuable use. We don't want a piece of super valuable land (could be producing food, etc) that is dormant simply because someone refuses to sell.
But we also don't want to be the arbiter of what counts as valuable. So you state the value of the land and pay the tax on that value. If someone else can extract more value, they can buy it from you at the stated price.
I think this sort of tax makes less sense for intellectual property, because unlike land many people can use the same idea at once.
Not just directly (e.g. costs to grant patents, hear court cases etc.) but indirectly - people can make things completely on their own and end up being sued for it because of an obscure patent violation. This has a chilling effect on innovation in general.
Because of this, making the person with the special right have to pay for the costs of that right seems fair.
However, concentration of valuable IP in the hands of the few is also a problem. Limited duration copyright provides the greatest benefit to individual authors (by maximizing their bargaining power while limiting the bargaining power of IP-hoarders through erosion) and the public domain.
I can’t see how that would work now that the data is digitised and the filings are completely automated. At best it might work for some older music, but it wouldn’t work for anything produced after the rule was introduced because services would be created to automatically do the filing for artists.
An immeasurable treasure of music and other works of art in the public domain would still be in the hands of these rentiers on that basis.
You used to need to file a copy with the Library of Congress to obtain copyright. Then they'd start filing it, but immediately taking it out on loan, and lose it. Then they'd "file" it and take it out on loan before ever giving it over; the copy for the library never existed. Then they decided to just give up on the farce, and not make you file.
To renew a work, you should have to actually file a (non-DRM) copy with the Library of Congress, and not take it out on loan. If it's important enough to renew, it's important enough for the Library to demand an actual copy.
Now, I don't support having to file with the Library of Congress for the initial copyright, that'd disproportionately hurt independent people who publish on the Internet.
"IP" is an odd collection collection of things that actually work pretty different from each other. Patent limits the use of some kinds information; copyright limits the copying of other kinds of information. Both of these are naturally "non-rivalrous" - I can watch a movie or build an engine at the same time that you watch that same movie or build that same (kind of) engine and we don't interfere with each other. We artificially treat them as if they were rivalrous - where "there are only so many to go around" - so that the market will better reward their production. Letting them eventually fall into the public domain, however, ameliorates the dead weight loss we're causing by artificially driving up the price.
Trademark is a bit different. Someone choosing to do business with me, because they have had good experiences doing so in the past or heard about me from a friend, is a limited resource in a way information alone is not. Letting others confuse that by providing their own goods and services under my mark doesn't increase the total value available.
So your question isn't really a natural one. These things work differently and it makes sense that we treat them differently.
Having said that, your question does make me think about an issue I've seen crop up occasionally, where a long-standing brand known for high quality will self destruct by cutting the quality without cutting prices. If the reduction in quality allows for sufficient cutting of expenses, and the reduction in quality is not sufficiently, immediately obvious, this can radically increase margins without significantly decreasing volume and make people a lot of short term profit until the suckers buying the product figure it out. On the one hand, simply capping the length would presumably make this worse, not better. On the other hand, making them contingent on something beyond a certain point might be an interesting space to look for a solution.
Trademarks protect the consumer
For example, you would see "YC for budding young novelists" if copyright were more long-term and secure.
You can pay the living expenses of a whole lot of would-be-starving-artists-but-actually-baristas, for an enormous number of years, if you can collect investment revenue from the one who turned out to be Stephen King.
This idea is an extension of what copyright is for, which it to allow creators to make money, thus incentivizing them.
I support unlimited-duration copyright.
even with unlimited-length copyright, who would do that? if I'm the investor, I would just find a bunch of aspiring artists and offer to pay their living expenses for a year in exchange for ownership of the copyright. I'd ditch the ones that didn't make money and offer better terms to the successful ones for their next work. with unlimited-length copyright, I might be willing to give more people a one-year shot, but the end result would still be that most of them go back to their barista job.
Wow. That's an unpopular position around here!
Even among those of us who support copyright and cringe at the advocacy for piracy you often see in these threads, I think there is a lot more support for shortening copyright duration.
Zero copyright facilitates exploitation by certain corporations (telecoms, media giants), while unlimited copyright facilitates exploitation by a different set of corporations (IP-hoarding publishers). Limited duration copyright is the best option.
> unlimited copyright facilitates exploitation by a different set of corporations
"Exploitation" is a loaded word. Nobody is going to pay $500 to read Harry Potter. What you would see with unlimited copyright is what you already see: there is a reasonable maximum that can be charged for (say) books in a given market. In other markets (e.g. 3rd world), prices are lower.
Scientific publishing is an entirely different issue, BTW. Science journal publishers rape universities and the general public. That is not really because of copyright. It's a different system of abuse that I don't want to raise here.
Does anyone think that way? They shouldn't, because for almost all books, the income past 20 years is zero.
Now, corporations are a bit different, and if you're Disney making a movie, the revenue past 20 years is actually something you consider. Still... would the Avengers movies, say, not get made without 95 year copyright? I doubt it. They made enough money in the first year that they would still have been made even if copyright was quite short.
So I can't buy this argument that "almost-forever" copyright incentivizes creation. I mean, it does, to some degree. But with the current duration, we are ridiculously far past the law of diminishing returns.
This is false. It helps corporations and hardly anyone else. There was incentive to create music and other works before copyright and there would still be without it.
I really don't get this. Other people have already replied to you but not specifically on "long-term" vs your later "unlimited-duration" stand.
The USA adopted the Berne Convention in 1989. It stipulates that the duration of the term for copyright protection is the life of the author plus at least 50 years after their death. For some categories of works, the minimum duration is shorter. For example, the minimum term for applied art is 25 years. Movies have a minimum term of 50 years. Countries may choose a longer term of protection, and most countries have done so.
If you're a potential "budding young novelist", will you eschew that career because life + 50 years isn't unlimited and isn't long enough for you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
My proposal would undoubtedly allow literary agencies to take more chances, funding more new authors for longer periods of time.