A) copyright should be lowered to 10 or maybe 20 years.
B) content owners have the right to ask for however much they want for content if copyright lengths were reasonable
B) content owners have the right to ask for however much they want for content if copyright lengths were reasonable
Copyrights are possible to extend indefinitely.
The owner must declare a value every year for their copyrighted material.
The owner must pay X% of the material's value per year as tax.
The owner can release the copyright at any time.
Others may bid to own the copyright. If it is higher than the owner's declared value, the owner must raise their bid to match, or else the copyright is sold to the highest bidder.
Also it would mean that large corps pay for their copyright enforcement, unlike now, when a 1 man book is given the same protections as disney's stuff for the same cost, despite the fact that it costs 1000x more to protect disney.
Perhaps increase tax such that even giant companies can't afford the copyright after one or two decades. Let's say start with 10% and increase by 2.5% every year. The twentieth year the copyright would cost 60% of the declared value.
This is an idea I came up with, so likely has many issues to be worked out, but the core of the idea seems valid. We need to find out how much people value this information. We know how to get people to bid their actual values. We put IP and copyright and open source software into a Vickrey Auction. To do this you need not ask everyone every bit of IP, you would need to work out a statistically significant sampling of the population. This would be a multiple item auction, so you might have 1000 people in the auction, but only the top 750 bidders would walk away with access. The bottom 25% would have to go the year without. But since they would get access to all OSS and IP that they did not have to sample, they would still win out. The top 75% would, like any other Vickrey Auction, pay the amount of the highest bidder that did not win.
Owners would have the option to either keep it secret, or release it into the auctions. As the societal value of the item would be much larger having it open, every IP owner would choose to open it up so that they could get their share of the pot. Once an item has a fairly stable price, you wouldn't have to get a sampling every year for it. You would then either take funds from some other tax, or just print it, and subsidize the owners based on the value that the sampling provided.
Declare somewhat-short, fixed terms (5 years?) for every bit of content. The first term is free and then subsequent terms increase in cost geometrically. The first renewal could be an almost insignificant amount…but just the fact that it’s something would mean most content that is unmonetized would enter the public domain after the initial free term. Successive terms would start to only make sense for the most profitable content.
Being able to balance a healthy public domain with the ability for content creators to put out content that costs a ton to produce seems like it should be the goal of the copyright system.
This would mean they get payed well, and that there is a healthy competition in streaming services.
they already do. and content distributors and consumers all have the right to say "nah, your content isn't worth that much".
Take the True Detective series as an example. The first season is highly regarded, and took forever for it to get made. Lots of love and effort went into developing that story. Because of its success, the producer was asked to do a new "season". It was litterally pulled out of thin air with no iteratitive development time on the story, and was univerally panned and the creator admitted this. The point? Sometimes it takes time to develop a good story. Just ask JRR Martin.
I haven't seen True Detective, but maybe he could have pulled off a successful second season if he could have freely adapted someone like G.R.R. Martin's story.
Unfortunately any series trying that premise would need to wait like a century or pay Martin a ton of money, so you'll never know if it's interesting.
That doesn't make sense. I think most of the royalties come from the long tail of companies, and market cap is a really terrible way of determining the worth of a company
I also didn’t mean to imply right away. I meant “after 10-18 years”.