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Comment by jacobr1 | Hacker News Reader

10-year extensions with graduated costs. You get first 10 years upon publication, for free automatically, or for a nominal filing fee to register your claim. The next 10 years costs (extending to 20 total) now costs a meaningful fee. Maybe a fraction of sales structured like a license owned by the public/government, maybe a known schedule of fees based on the type of work, but either way it is a non-trivial sum. Then at 20, 30 and 40 there are further extensions each with higher costs, stopping at 50 years total. The copyright isn't tied to the creator's lifespan. Maybe we extend from my proposed 50 to 70 years to match current expectation, so Mickey gets protected (or would have) but there is a social benefit that gets shared.

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Personally, I think this is the best solution I've heard. It still has problems in that copyright holders need to be proactive and it punishes work that can't pay the copyright extension fee that doesn't become popular until later but I think these are reasonable compromises to make to serve the larger good.

I haven't figured out a way to push this narrative in any meaningful way. People have a hard time distinguishing arguments against copyright from arguments for copyright reform. Most of the time I have to stress that I'm not for copyright abolishment but more reasonable copyright terms and extension protocols.

> it punishes work that can't pay the copyright extension fee

One tradeoff is to have the fee be proportional to the revenue it is generating. But this could encourage extension-by-default, rather than making it an intentional decision the copyright holder has to make: Is it worth "buying the monopoly rights." I think I would be ok with that if the increase for future extensions was steep. But that does also come at the cost of the second part,

> that doesn't become popular until later

You have a small-time creator that doesn't extend, and so loses out on massive potential revenue derived from future popularity of the work decades later. This would be unfortunate ... but on the other hand I think society would be more likely to make this true and create interesting derivative works if there were more works that were derivable. You need to keep durations short to make that happen.

I like the idea of renewal at a creator-set price.

Every 10 years, declare that your work is worth $x, then pay a renewal fee of $x/10 (or some other fraction based on more solid economics).

If anyone volunteers to pay more than $x in place of your $x/10 your work is now public domain.

I have a much simpler solution: copyright terms are fourteen years from date of publication. There are no extensions.

It could even be a lot shorter nowadays. Nearly all media gets nearly all of its profit in the first year. A lot of commercial software goes out of date in a few months rather than yearly releases.

> Copyright is a right. Having to pay for it sounds absurd.

It really isn't. It's a temporary privilege of state enforced monopoly.

That's even more corporation favoured. It's much easier to stomach the price as corporation than author...

Not if you're still making money off of the work. But if you're not making money off of it, it's an incentive to let the copyright expire. Corporations might sit on things that they're not making money off of in order to try to make money off of them later, but they'd be limited to 50 years, which is a vast improvement.

Only for "non-profitable" works. It is a downside in the tradeoff. But even then the escalating price for extensions should offer an incentive to limit what works fall into this category and subsidize society when they do.

We are not just balancing the individual creators vs corporations, but also creators of derived works, and societies benefit at-large of more creative works in general. We want to maintain and compensate creators "enough" to maintain incentives for creation, but otherwise maximize the commons.

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