Just fix the root problem. Copyright should last fifteen years max. The system now just incentivizes companies to hoard old stuff and eschew making risky new stuff.
So Disney would be paying 93% of their Mickey Mouse revenue in taxes this year. Have the IRS enforce it, where they can audit the books.
Or they can just give up the copyright.
This would also solve the abandoned works problem. Every copyright would have to have an annual filing to maintain it, with the owner listed publicly. No filing? Copyright invalid, public domain.
And lastly, it would basically put a cap of 99 years, because even if you're making a trillion dollars a year from your copyright, it wouldn't make sense to pay 100% or more of your revenue.
And it seems very difficult to calculate a percentage among mixed works.
The ultimate goal is to put as much work into the public domain as possible, since that was the original goal of the framers of the Constitution.
If you want more renewals to avoid orphan works, I'd just add more renewals. They don't need to cost much.
And the most effective way to get copyright to expire on bigger holders is to set a fixed time limit.
I dislike the idea of having "most" copyright expire quickly while the rest doesn't, because longer copyright is going to disproportionately be on big works owned by big holders. I don't think you should have that as a goal at all.
So I think you should just go with a fixed time limit. Like the original 28 years.
And a mechanism to avoid abandonment is a good idea, but make it fair to everyone.
... which were expensive to create, generally. Remember, copyright is not intended as a "reward" or a tool for social redistribution, it is intended to incentivize creating new works.
An argument can be made that allowing the $100m movie production to pay for longer copyrights than the $1,000 amateur shoot gives the creators an incentive to run bigger budget risks, because they can monetize it better.
(I don't agree and I do think 28 years of blanket protection should be enough, but the argument is valid.)
And big projects with big advertising budgets probably recoup their money faster than small projects.
For example, the first 5 years would be $100, the next 5 would be $200 ... by year 100 you're paying $52.5 million to extend your copyright by another 5 years.
You could even set up a scheme where you can pre-pay your copyright dues to a set period. Want 30 years w/o having to renew, put down $5,600 up front and it's good. Want to test the waters on something and lock in for 5? Send in $100 and let it go abandoned 5 years later if things don't pan out.
The main points are 1) Payment every year that gets cost prohibitive and 2) Annual registration to solve the abandoned works problem.
I can't imagine someone saying, "I want to work on this idea, but I won't because I know it won't be profitable for many years".
IP is often owned by offshore entities not subject to any taxation whatsoever, or minimal at best (1-3% range). It then gets rented to onshore entities that actually use it, and they pay enormous IP licensing fees for that.
You can't fix complexity by building up even more complexity, something must be simplified instead.
> No filing? Copyright invalid, public domain.
This would kill copyright entirely. 99.999% of copyright-eligible works are commercially worthless and always will be. Even if registration were free, it would not be worth the time to do it in most cases. However, we want to protect all copyrightable works so that in the 0.001% case, the right person or people can capitalize on the value of their work. For example, if you wrote a story years ago and would like to make it into a novel, it would be unfair if anyone could copy your story because you didn't register your copyright.
> 99.999% of copyright-eligible works are commercially worthless and always will be
Then it should be no problem to have it in the public domain.
> However, we want to protect all copyrightable works so that in the 0.001% case, the right person or people can capitalize on the value of their work
Why?
> For example, if you wrote a story years ago and would like to make it into a novel, it would be unfair if anyone could copy your story because you didn't register your copyright.
Why? The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to pursue risky creative endeavors and then know that they are protected from someone stealing it before they can make money on it. If someone has no intention of making money, then they will create for free, and there is no reason to protect it. If they want to make money, they can register it.
But if I create something without expecting it to be successful why shouldn't that be protected on the off chance it does end up being successful?
Copyright is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking. If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.
Copyright encourages creative risk taking precisely by protecting the economic interests (e.g., profits) of those creative risk takers.
> If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.
People don't take risks when there's zero possibility of reward. Even people who create mainly for themselves would be demoralized by the idea that even if they were successful, anyone could just take and exploit their work.
The point is registration won't affect creative output.
Currently, most works are only registered when owners have an actual infringer that they want to assert statutory damages against, or when a work is a commercial work that will certainly be infringed. If mandatory registration were enacted, the Copyright Office would need to handle hundreds or thousands of times as many registrations.
Even an impossible 1000x expansion of registration capacity wouldn't come close to being able to register everything that people would actually want to protect. For example, a user on Quora [2] estimated that 100 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day. Even if registration were free and streamlined, the yearly capacity of a 1000x Office would be saturated by 5 days of Instagram photos alone.
If registration were mandatory, commercial producers of creative works would not be affected because they would quickly learn to register everything. Ordinary people who don't want their Instagram photos to be exploited by others for profit, however, would lose. Opportunists who want to use the works of others without paying would win.
So, even if mandatory registration didn't affect creative output, it would be ridiculously expensive and would upset who wins and who loses in a way that would be counter to the public interest. It's never going to happen.
Goals in copyright policy should be addressed narrowly. If you want more works to enter the public domain, then you adjust the copyright term. If you want people to be able to use apparently-abandoned works, then you make apparent abandonment a defense to a claim of copyright infringement. If you want to expand Fair Use, then you amend the statute. Mandatory registration, however, would be a dramatic change that would upset everything; it's not worth discussing and I regret spending so much time on this response.
[0] https://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2019/ar2019.pdf
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/about/budget/2020/senate-budget-te...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-being-uploaded-on-...
"Steamboat Willie" is copyrighted, but I don't know if Disney actually makes any money off of it at all (even if there were a good way to account that). What Disney wants is for you to not be using it.
You might have a better case for, say, Cinderella, a film that they actually do make some money off of. Again, I'm not sure how they'd account for it -- it's available on streaming, and how much of that revenue is due to Cinderella?
Even if you were taking a percentage of their DVD sales, I suspect they'd be happy to pay it. As with Steamboat Willie, their intention is for you not to be using it more than their actual use.