So the copyright holder would have the option to EITHER cashout at any point (and consider the work/invested effort paid) OR counter-bid the sum of everyone to keep it.
Not sure about the implications, but it would encourage the most (economically) productive route
Free then make it cost more. A lot could enter the public domain, and valuable IP could be kept by companies as long as they’re willing to pay.
Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.
How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?
I'm not a fan of Disney at all, just pointing out what i belive might be the flaw in the argument.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
As I said in a sibling comment, quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion as opposed to "final bill that has been revised in committee and is going to the floor for a full vote". The details of implementation are certainly critical, and not trivial either! I'm fully in support of thinking through various use cases. But part of why I'm interested in alternate approaches is that they might give us finer grained tools.
>Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
I have actually considered that as well but didn't add it into a quickie comment. If we take the second path of approaches I listed there, then thinking about it all open source software would fall under a special even more permissive class of the tier 3, in that it already has "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing for all right? Except that it's also free. The motivation here is the "advancement of the useful arts & sciences" and the public good, so having it be explicit that "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
All that said, I'll also ask fwiw if it'd even be that big a deal given the pace of development? I do think it'd be both ideal and justified if OSS had a longer period for free, that's still a square deal to the public IMO. But like, even if an OSS work went out protection (and keep in mind that a motivated community that could raise even a few thousand dollars would be able to just pay for an extra decade no problem, the cost doesn't really ramp up for awhile [which might itself be considered a flaw?]) after 10 years, how much is it worth it that 2016 era OSS (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window) now could have proprietary works be worth it against 10 year old proprietary software all getting pushed into the public domain far faster? That's worth some contemplation. Maybe requiring that source/assets be provided to the Library of Congress or something and is released at the same time the work loses copyright would be a good balance, having all that available for down the road would be a huge win vs what we've seen up until now.
Anyway, all food for thought is all.
Indeed.
Setting aside variable details like time frames and cost structures which can be debated separately, what I found interesting about your suggestion is it's a mechanism to create an escalating incentive for copyright holders to relinquish copyrights even sooner than the standard copyright period. Currently, no matter what the term length, it costs nothing to sit on a copyright until it expires - so everyone does - even if they never do anything with the copyright. And the copyright exists even if the company goes bankrupt or the copyright holder dies. Thus we end up with zombie copyrights which keep lurking in the dark for works which are almost certainly abandon-ware or orphan-ware simply because our current system defaults to one-and-done granting of "life of the inventor + 70 years" for everything.
Obviously, we should dramatically shorten the standard copyright length but no matter what we shorten it to (10, 15, 20 yrs etc) we should consider requiring some recurring renewal before expiration as a separate idea. Even if it's just paying a small processing fee and sending in simple DIY form, it sets the do-nothing-default to "auto-expire" for things the inventor doesn't care about (and may even have forgotten about). That's a net benefit to society we should evaluate separately from debates about term lengths.
I see your suggestion about automatically escalating the cost of recurring renewal being another separate layer also worth considering on its own merits. Regardless of when it kicks in, how it's calculated, or how much it escalates - I see it as a mechanism which could also achieve some net positive societal benefits by escalating the incentive to relinquish copyrights sooner.
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.