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Comment by devsda | Hacker News Reader

I think it should be proportionate (& increasing exponentially) to the revenue(not profit because hollywood accounting).

Big coporations like Disney can hold on to the material and pay the sum with profits from other ip if it's fixed.

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> Big coporations like Disney can hold on to the material and pay the sum with profits from other ip if it's fixed.

I think that's okay, Disney has lots of money but they aren't stupid, i.e. they won't spend money unless they expect a return on investment.

What you really want to prevent are orphan works which are copyrighted but no one can get a copy of.

Assuming fee based renewal, proportionate to revenue is problematic for works that fall out of publishing.

There's lots of works from when I was young that nobody is interested in publishing, even though I would like to see them again. They make zero revenue now (and probably didn't make much before), so I suspect the rights holders would abandon them if they had to pay any fee, especially an escalating fee.

I'm personally less worried about works that remain in print.

Couldn't you print it yourself? If it's that obscure and that important to you to own a hard copy.

Print them how? Am I supposed to type up all the pages of that falling apart book - book scanning helps but still requires extensive effort? What about the page that got ripped out and is missing, how do I recreate that?

While it is likely legal for me to go through all that effort for myself, it isn't legal for me to share the fruits of my effort with someone else who wants a copy so they need to do it themself. Even if they have a worn out copy themself it isn't clear that I can print them a new copy. If I want to share this work with someone else who might want it I'm stuck - I can only do the above for personal use.

> I suspect the rights holders would abandon them if they had to pay any fee

Wouldn’t that just put the works in the public domain, allowing others to legally publish the works? What would be the downside?

Yes, that's the upside. That's why people want a meaningful fee.

If it's revenue based and there's no revenue, then the rightsholder will renew to protect their options.

Why complicate things and allow for even more creative accounting? Elevating flat fees give you a term that is inversely proportional to revenue. With flat exponential fees, term is logarithmic in revenue.

I completely disagree. The previous comment's idea is better: just charge fees. The government shouldn't be worried about exactly how profitable something is, because you can argue that too many ways (see Hollywood accounting). It's too easy for large corporations to invent "creative accounting" tricks, and just basing things on revenue penalizes any company that invests larger amounts of money in ventures that have lower profit margins (e.g. doing high-quality movie production with physical models, on-location shooting, etc. instead of just using some crappy AI to generate everything).

With exponentially increasing fees, the copyright holder can decide for themselves if it's economically worthwhile to pay the renewal fees or release it into the public domain. If the cost to extend copyright another 5 years after 50+ years is $1B, for instance, very few copyright holders will bother with that unless it's a highly profitable property.

The problem with "just charge fees" is that it wastes an excellent opportunity to make the copyright system more useful for individual authors and artists, and instead strengthens the status quo with even more incentives to consolidate copyright powers under mega-corporations. Long before the fees got high enough to incentivize a corporation to abandon a work's copyright to the public domain, they would force authors to sell out to a corporation in return for a share of future earnings, rather than accept an immediate loss of all royalties.

Presumably you could set up "just charge fees" to have a grace period of 3-5 years to register your copyright (and pay any back fees) if you happen to want to enforce the copyright after that time.

It's also possible that you could set up a smaller fee for a news article, etc.

There are lots of implementation details that make "just charge fees" work.

Back fees?

So I use a 4 year old work, that I assume is public domain, and then the creator, pays his back fees and sues me?

alternatively, a creator creates a work, gets 5 years of protection, and never pays the fees that he owes.

Yes, exactly that model. In practice, you would treat that 4-year-old work as "under copyright" the same way everything written is under copyright today. This sort of thing gives you a chance to market your creative work with protection and avoid paying fees until you know that it is valuable. That would then allow the fees to be relatively high since only people with valuable IP would pay.

The alternative is that everyone's blog enters the public domain immediately upon writing unless they want to pay $XXX per article, which also seems wrong to me.

why don't you just treat it as being x years free?

I think the first 5 years should be free; after that, fees apply, starting at probably $1000 for the next 5 years, and going up exponentially afterwards.

You could do that too.

Return ownership of IP to humans only. You'll solve basically all of the issues currently faced that way.

How would that apply in the case of, say, Peter Jackson's 2003, $281 million "The Lord of the Rings" film series?

Does Jackson own the IP? Do actors own part of the IP for every scene they're in? What does Jackson offer to investors, to get the backing he needs to hire loads of horse riders or whatever? Do we do it Star Citizen style, giving Jackson a few hundred million upfront with no obligation to deliver anything?

You make an excellent point. Companies could eg. have 25yrs to make a profit.

On the other hand: if an artist produces something that slumbers in anonymity for decades before it suddenly explodes into popularity and becomes part of the cultural canon, then I'd want the artist to reap whatever benefits possible. That is: if anyone is making big bucks off of that, it first and foremost should be the artist, for as long as they're alive.

Interesting.

I'm against long term copyright, because things become part of the 'cultural canon'

Why should I pay George Lucas because I want to say "use the force luke"*

'Cultural Canon' shouldn't be owned by anyone, because it, by definition belongs to everyone.

*Yes I know thats a misquote.

On what basis would that form of explosion actually happen? In my understanding of the history of art, what often happens when something "slumbers in anonymity then explodes" it is quite popular in a subculture but then eventually gets mainstreamed when the mainstream culture comes around and people start to explore that subculture. In other words, it is a commercially successful product from day one.

I fail to understand the problem.

Assuming some nominal or zero starting fee. The author can choose to sell his rights at the beginning, or can choose to keep the rights.

If x years later, the renewal comes up and isn't worth it, then he doesn't have to pay it. the value to the author isn't worth the value to the public. If a mega corp comes along and buys it, they have taken on a risk that it will be worth more in the future, and the author has gained some extra income.

If the mega corp think its worth buying the rights, theres probably a good business case for the property, so the author should be able to get the money somehow. If not, the mega corp is giving the author a nice bonus.

> The government shouldn't be worried about exactly how profitable something is, because you can argue that too many ways (see Hollywood accounting). It's too easy for large corporations to invent "creative accounting" tricks

This is also the core reason why tax systems should be simplified simplified simplified.

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