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Comment by cmeacham98 | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain how this is better? Also, how would we write a law to determine if something is "commercially viable"?

The idea is specifically to solve the orphan works problem.

Practically speaking, life+70 is not that far off from perpetual copyright anyway. Nobody cares if a book published today will be escheated to the public domain in 2093, and very few works from 1927 are valuable enough to retain copyright today. In fact, it's so valueless that the vast majority of works still under copyright do not have public documentation of title. The only way to find out who owns these works is to get sued for pirating them.

So the idea is to create some kind of small formality that people have to jump through in order to retain ownership over a work, because vastly more works will hit the public domain even if it means Mickey Mouse will always and forever live in a cramped pet store cage shaped like a circle-C.

How to define "commercially viable" is... complicated. You can either make copyright fully pay-to-play to soak Disney, or you can err on the side of cheap renewals. I've also heard talk of sliding-scales based on taxable value of the property under copyright. I don't think it really matters as long as we have a reasonable process to strip orphan works of their copyright protection.

Mickey Mouse should be under copyright and Mickey Mouse should be taxed to an inch of his nasty rodent life are two separate questions and should be handled as such. A small fee should be fine (much less than the total cost of a patent, say) perhaps with a requirement to keep the work publicly available (print on demand and digital makes this relatively easy).

> The only way to find out who owns these works is to get sued for pirating them.

Basically "old time radio" too.

If the copyright makes more money than it costs to maintain, then it is financially viable. I often see this approach proposed alongside a renewal fee that rises each time it is renewed, so that works will eventually become too expensive to maintain copyright on and thus aren't held in perpetuity.

What stops people from buying 1000 copyrights, then using the profitable ones to pay the ongoing fees while also buying more?

The law isn't making that determination, the entities paying to indefinitely extend its copyright are (presumably at exponentially increasing rates). If it isn't viable, they don't pay and the copyright lapses.

The copyright owner determines that. Put some price on renewal and let the owner decide if they want to pay it or not. For the vast majority of content, it's worthless after x years and they will just let it lapse.

We could then shorten copyright down to something like 20 years and anything still being sold or used can be renewed while completely obsolete gameboy games become freed.

Even if the fee was something like $10/year, probably the majority of copyrights would not be renewed.

As in as a company you have to pay to extend copyright on a certain work.

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