so that the family of a creator who dies young/suddenly are supported for a while
To provide this case, make it "the maximum of [life of author, 10 years]".
IMHO 25 years regardless of author lifetime would be more than enough.
To provide this case, make it "the maximum of [life of author, 10 years]".
IMHO 25 years regardless of author lifetime would be more than enough.
It should be easy to automate this electronically to the point where you upload a copy of the work and check the box for every country you want to register in and it does them all at the same time.
Or you could just have every country charge the same fee and let people register in their home countries to much the same effect.
And I'm not sure what you're talking about with being exploited on $island. You can imagine about the same thing happening there as happens in countries that already don't have copyright enforcement, i.e. nobody cares because nobody there has any real money anyway. It's not like they can export to countries where the copyright is registered.
If it's a flat fee for the first 15 or 30 years then it should take a lot of wind out of their sails.
If people start doing the math and saying "but at 60 years this is completely insane!" then just ask for a list of affected stakeholders that this would bankrupt. I suspect the only people on the list would be Disney.
"At the 150 year mark Disney can decide for themselves whether another 5 years is worth a billion dollars."
That's one reason that the plan would fail. One of the reasons I like explicit registration is that allowing these sorts of indefinite extensions for some works makes it less likely that companies would lobby heavily against the plans. By making it deliberatively punitive for these scenarios, you put the plan up against the same forces that are already fighting (and successfully, at that) for blanket copyright extensions.
One needs to write the law/regulations very carefully and be prepared to strike down extremely hard on corps who will try to manipulate this, eg by saying for a movie that the copyright work is on the DVD and you bought that for 1 cent but the packaging and label cost $19.99 and the work isn't available without those (or saying the customer pays for the TMs used separately or whatever other Hollywood accounting means they concoct).