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.