You can go get almost any Super Nintendo ROM on archive.org right now, legally.

I hope to see this foothold extended.

There is an explicit exemption for:

"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."

AKA old console roms. https://archive.org has piles now unchallenged for years as a result.

Copyright enforcement seems often "use it or lose it"

SPAM didn't act fast enough to protect their brand, and once it became commonplace as a term for internet garbage it was considered too late to enforce.

Unless someone like Nintendo makes a new Super Nintendo that can play original cartridges, I don't expect they would do well in court trying to enforce given the exemption and after doing nothing for so long at this point.

I study IP law academically but IANAL. With that said, I think we are honestly at a free for all at this point, and the more people that host ROMs openly, the worse the case against them gets.

DMCA is the only tool people that wish to stop distribution of media have, so it might as well be a blanket statement of legal distribution IMO, and archive.org certainly interprets it this way.

Sure, boost that to 10 or even 20 years if needed[0]. But from then on extension costs should grow exponential - otherwise we risk locking down work for duration longer than a human lifetime. Like it already happens with Disney.

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[0] - 20 years may have been appropriate in mid-20th century, but I'd argue it isn't now. Cultural creation accelerates exponentially, but long copyrights prevent the ability to improve on prior art to accelerate in lock step.

I strongly dispute this statement, unless your definition of reasonable income does not include at least making back the money you spent on producing the content in the first place. You're ignoring all the small creators who produce new material for niche markets, possibly as a side income rather than their main jobs, and rely on the long tail of sales of that original work to make it financially worthwhile. Not every copyright holder is a Hollywood movie studio, big name record label or international book publisher you've heard of.

Your longer periods might be more realistic in those cases, and even 10 years might not be enough to break even.

I suppose that's the $LARGE_AMOUNT question, isn't it?

As a personal opinion, I think copyright is OK as an economic incentive unless and until we find something that works better, but the protection should be determined by what makes it economically reasonable for people to create and share useful works, taking into account all the circumstances and over the long term. There is clearly no single duration of protection that is even close to that benchmark for all situations, because something like a blockbuster movie or smash hit video game might make several times its production costs back within months of initial distribution and that might be a large majority of the revenue it will ever make, while those small, niche-content creators I talked about before might not break even for a decade or two. As ever with debates about alternatives to current copyright, things start to get sticky when you try to figure out a reasonable way to estimate the effects of any proposed change without actually making it and then waiting a decade or three to see what happens.

I like the idea of shortening copyright protection but at the same time considering other rights to protect things of value that are, sometimes incidentally, protected by copyright today. For example, I have no problem with the requirements that exist in some places to credit the creators of a work, as an entirely separate matter from copyright. I think there is also a lot of room to explore safeguards against intruding on a larger creative effort too soon, such as where an author has put considerable effort into world-building and is continuing to produce successful new works set in that world, in which case allowing poor-quality fan fiction to flood the market as soon as the copyright on the first work in that world expires could sharply devalue the overall creative effort for the author and so result in fewer or lower quality works subsequently being produced and shared by that author, which is a harm to society as well.

In short, I don't think you can reasonably draw a single line with anything resembling our current copyright system. I think there should probably be several lines, in each of several colours, and some of them should be circles and triangles. But then given how difficult enforcement often is already and how widespread misunderstandings about the existing law are, that might not be practical either. Economics and intangible goods are a tough combination.

I think GP's scheme isn't awful honestly; it would have the effect of drastically lowering the practical length of copyright for most works while providing artists with a way to maintain copyright over works that are actually highly successful. (A per-year doubling might be a bit much but I think it's on the right track.)

If the practical effect was that we mostly got back to the original copyright term we had in the US (14 years with the possibility to extend that once), I'd be pretty happy. Maybe start the fees after the 14th year.

Corporations can start paying that escalating price right away.

(Edit: misread GP and removed a paragraph)

Non-transferable copyright/patents?

1. Different industries have different paces; it might take 25 years for any NASA software to be fully developed in the first place, whereas if you haven't made back your money on your singleplayer videogame after 10 years, you probably won't ever make it back. Point is, there is no flat duration that is fair to every work out there. 2. almost by definition, the stuff we care about is more profitable and will therefore be kept under copyright longer. 3. I wonder whether copyright expiration is actually helpful for software, when it doesn't provide you with source code. I'd like to see some mechanism that incentivizes the IP owner to publish source code after their copyright expires - perhaps by offering a conditional extension to the copyright duration in exchange for putting the source code in escrow?

Really, I don't think software's IP type should be "copyright" in the first place. It doesn't make sense to cut and paste a binary like you would with a book's text.

NASA is a government agency, the work should be in the public domain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...

But if you think about online games, it becomes abandonware if you can no longer log into the game servers?

Or if your product is dependent on DRM, then is becomes abandonware when the DRM servers shut down.

I think different classes of media will require different definitions of when they become abandonware, but I think we'll mostly know it when we see it.