I think an even more simple and self limiting solution would be to require a payment for copyright that doubles every period.

For example, the first 5 years would be $100, the next 5 would be $200 ... by year 100 you're paying $52.5 million to extend your copyright by another 5 years.

You could even set up a scheme where you can pre-pay your copyright dues to a set period. Want 30 years w/o having to renew, put down $5,600 up front and it's good. Want to test the waters on something and lock in for 5? Send in $100 and let it go abandoned 5 years later if things don't pan out.

This can be easily gamed with some creative accounting.

IP is often owned by offshore entities not subject to any taxation whatsoever, or minimal at best (1-3% range). It then gets rented to onshore entities that actually use it, and they pay enormous IP licensing fees for that.

You can't fix complexity by building up even more complexity, something must be simplified instead.

Sure, they payment terms are certainly negotiable.

The main points are 1) Payment every year that gets cost prohibitive and 2) Annual registration to solve the abandoned works problem.

But that's a problem if you have to wait for years for your work to become popular.

The point of copyright is to offer a limited monopoly to encourage making risky things. If you can't or don't want to monetize it, then you don't need the monopoly, and it's unlikely that such a scheme would stifle innovation.

I can't imagine someone saying, "I want to work on this idea, but I won't because I know it won't be profitable for many years".

So start the clock after a (small) number of initial years. And/or make it free until publication (so e.g. making the rounds with publishers doesn't require you to start paying). Or tweak the exponents.

But if you aren't selling anything that lets you keep copyright forever.

And it seems very difficult to calculate a percentage among mixed works.

Good point. Make a minimum fee of $1000 times X years, or whatever is enough to find the right balance.

The ultimate goal is to put as much work into the public domain as possible, since that was the original goal of the framers of the Constitution.

It seems pretty complicated to strike a balance this way, in comparison to simple time-based methods. And there's basically no reason not to keep paying the fees up to 80 or 90 years under your scheme.

If you want more renewals to avoid orphan works, I'd just add more renewals. They don't need to cost much.

I want renewals to avoid abandonment and I also want most copyrights to expire quickly. I think a fee structure could be found that gets most copyrights to expire quickly without discouraging innovation.

I don't think it's good to make smaller holders' copyright expire more quickly than bigger holders'.

And the most effective way to get copyright to expire on bigger holders is to set a fixed time limit.

I dislike the idea of having "most" copyright expire quickly while the rest doesn't, because longer copyright is going to disproportionately be on big works owned by big holders. I don't think you should have that as a goal at all.

So I think you should just go with a fixed time limit. Like the original 28 years.

And a mechanism to avoid abandonment is a good idea, but make it fair to everyone.

>longer copyright is going to disproportionately be on big works owned by big holders

... which were expensive to create, generally. Remember, copyright is not intended as a "reward" or a tool for social redistribution, it is intended to incentivize creating new works.

An argument can be made that allowing the $100m movie production to pay for longer copyrights than the $1,000 amateur shoot gives the creators an incentive to run bigger budget risks, because they can monetize it better.

(I don't agree and I do think 28 years of blanket protection should be enough, but the argument is valid.)

The more incentive to go big, the more incentive for those with less money to go home and not even bother.

And big projects with big advertising budgets probably recoup their money faster than small projects.

"Mickey Mouse" isn't copyrighted, it's trademarked. There is, I believe, pretty wide consensus that trademarks remain valid as long as they're in use.

"Steamboat Willie" is copyrighted, but I don't know if Disney actually makes any money off of it at all (even if there were a good way to account that). What Disney wants is for you to not be using it.

You might have a better case for, say, Cinderella, a film that they actually do make some money off of. Again, I'm not sure how they'd account for it -- it's available on streaming, and how much of that revenue is due to Cinderella?

Even if you were taking a percentage of their DVD sales, I suspect they'd be happy to pay it. As with Steamboat Willie, their intention is for you not to be using it more than their actual use.

You seem to misunderstand how copyright works. Registration is not required and there is no comprehensive registry of everything copyrighted. Copyrights are created upon creation of the work and inure to the author. Registration merely grants the author certain benefits (e.g., a right to pursue statutory damages against infringers).

> No filing? Copyright invalid, public domain.

This would kill copyright entirely. 99.999% of copyright-eligible works are commercially worthless and always will be. Even if registration were free, it would not be worth the time to do it in most cases. However, we want to protect all copyrightable works so that in the 0.001% case, the right person or people can capitalize on the value of their work. For example, if you wrote a story years ago and would like to make it into a novel, it would be unfair if anyone could copy your story because you didn't register your copyright.

I'm actually very aware of how copyright works. I know there is no registration. That's a huge problem, as it leads to abandoned works. I want to change the system to require registration.

> 99.999% of copyright-eligible works are commercially worthless and always will be

Then it should be no problem to have it in the public domain.

> However, we want to protect all copyrightable works so that in the 0.001% case, the right person or people can capitalize on the value of their work

Why?

> For example, if you wrote a story years ago and would like to make it into a novel, it would be unfair if anyone could copy your story because you didn't register your copyright.

Why? The purpose of copyright is to encourage people to pursue risky creative endeavors and then know that they are protected from someone stealing it before they can make money on it. If someone has no intention of making money, then they will create for free, and there is no reason to protect it. If they want to make money, they can register it.

This would be a plagiarists manifesto. Just because I can't afford to copyright everything I write, that doesn't mean it's ok for anyone else to just take it. Also, what happens if i intend to copyright it when it's finished, but someone gets hold of a copy and publishes it before I'm ready? Some authors can take decades to develop a project. What you're advocating is a poorly thought out recipe for publishers to systematically rip off artists.

Creating something without the intention of making money is different from creating something without the prospect of making money. The former is already covered by the likes of Creative Commons licensing or just not enforcing copyright.

But if I create something without expecting it to be successful why shouldn't that be protected on the off chance it does end up being successful?

> But if I create something without expecting it to be successful why shouldn't that be protected on the off chance it does end up being successful?

Copyright is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking. If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.

> Copyright is not meant to protect your profits. It's meant to encourage creative risk taking.

Copyright encourages creative risk taking precisely by protecting the economic interests (e.g., profits) of those creative risk takers.

> If you're going to take the creative risk anyway, then copyright isn't necessary.

People don't take risks when there's zero possibility of reward. Even people who create mainly for themselves would be demoralized by the idea that even if they were successful, anyone could just take and exploit their work.

Then they can just register their work. Make the first five years free or even 10.

The point is registration won't affect creative output.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Processing registrations and maintaining a registry has significant costs. In 2019, the US Copyright Office made 547,837 registrations and received about $35 million in total fees. [0] In 2019, the Registrar of Copyrights asked Congress for a budget of $92.9 million. [1]

Currently, most works are only registered when owners have an actual infringer that they want to assert statutory damages against, or when a work is a commercial work that will certainly be infringed. If mandatory registration were enacted, the Copyright Office would need to handle hundreds or thousands of times as many registrations.

Even an impossible 1000x expansion of registration capacity wouldn't come close to being able to register everything that people would actually want to protect. For example, a user on Quora [2] estimated that 100 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day. Even if registration were free and streamlined, the yearly capacity of a 1000x Office would be saturated by 5 days of Instagram photos alone.

If registration were mandatory, commercial producers of creative works would not be affected because they would quickly learn to register everything. Ordinary people who don't want their Instagram photos to be exploited by others for profit, however, would lose. Opportunists who want to use the works of others without paying would win.

So, even if mandatory registration didn't affect creative output, it would be ridiculously expensive and would upset who wins and who loses in a way that would be counter to the public interest. It's never going to happen.

Goals in copyright policy should be addressed narrowly. If you want more works to enter the public domain, then you adjust the copyright term. If you want people to be able to use apparently-abandoned works, then you make apparent abandonment a defense to a claim of copyright infringement. If you want to expand Fair Use, then you amend the statute. Mandatory registration, however, would be a dramatic change that would upset everything; it's not worth discussing and I regret spending so much time on this response.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2019/ar2019.pdf

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/about/budget/2020/senate-budget-te...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-being-uploaded-on-...