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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

I think an interesting solution would be to charge a compounding fee for copyright protection. So let's say you have a no charge for the first X years. Your first renewal is almost nothing but after that it increases rapidly so that by the time you're pushing 50+ years the payments are only affordable for the largest properties. Now it might be worth millions for Disney to keep their 70 year old copyrights for another few years but at least that doesn't force every single piece of content into the same 70+ year IP regime. In fact it provides a strong incentive for most content to enter the public domain quickly. The licensing fees from the copyright system could be paid back to protected artists based on measures of downloads, plays and performances.

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This sounds good, but how do you price the fees fairly for people who make different kinds of works?

If I'm a photographer, do I need to pay extension fees on all my thousands of works? Does my neighbor who makes movies only need to pay one fee? What if I make a book containing my photographs -- is that just one free? Can Disney make one long 40 hour movie containing all their stuff together and count that as one work?

Excellent point. Maybe this sort of plan would be unworkable given the ability to end run or exploit the system in certain ways (or just the way disciplines naturally blend into one another)? Maybe you could benchmark based on markets (the music industry is x billion, y million minutes of music are produced every year, etc.) and where a work doesn't clearly fall into a category it could go into the cheaper one or be interpolated.

That is an interesting and difficult problem. What if it were framed a little differently, though: Suppose there were a federal licensing tax. You'd pay, say, 5% of licensing revenue to the IRS for the first 20 years, 25% for the next 20 years, 60% for the 20 years after that, and so on. Obviously these are made-up numbers, but the idea would be that an increasing fraction of the license revenue would go to government.

I just remembered a variation on a story in which you declare what your property is worth and get taxed on that. The reason not to lower the price is that anyone can buy it from you at that price.

Maybe you can declare the value of your IP and the government taxes you like 2% on it. I don't think this would really work but I'm tossing it out anyway.

Perhaps we could allow your examples, with fair use as an escape valve. The more work you lump under the same license, the larger the excerpt that's plausibly fair use.

I don't think that this would be a problem. It's not likely that a photographer would have a large number of photos that were each earning lots of money, so they would tend to just let the copyright expire. They can always take more photos to continue earning.

This is just a way of saying that the vast majority of individual photos don't represent a lot of creative work, and hence are a lot less worthy of protection. I would imagine that even a major photographer such as Ansel Adams wouldn't have more than a dozen photos earning good money more than a decade after the photo was first published.

My objection to steko's idea would be more that it is precisely the most important works that we are going to want to copy / create derivatives from, and yet these are precisely the works that will be the most able to perpetuate their protections.

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