I like your general concept, but my concern with any fixed fee is that it pushes out small publishers in favor of big ones.

A small publisher who is making say $300,000 from their work after 40 years can't afford to register it, but Disney can easily afford the 50 year fee.

Also, the reason for registration right away is because otherwise you can't be sure a work is in the public domain or who to license it from for at least however long the no registration period is. If it's 10 years, then you have to wait at least 10 years to find out if someone has a claim on it.

I don’t see how it would favour people with money, as it should become simple economics: Disney can afford the $1,300,000 at year 40, but if they project that their revenue from the work will be $300,000 in that year, why would they renew the copyright? They would instead allow it to lapse, and probably get somewhat reduced revenue. Cash flow should be the only situation where people with money could be favoured, and copyright renewal loans would become a thing to smooth that out (though I wouldn’t expect them to ever be common).

Registration is a heavy burden that has caused all sorts of pain in the past, and although terms are unreasonable these days I do think that automatic copyright is reasonable. You’re not unsure for ten years, you know for ten years from publication that it’s copyrighted—so you contact whoever wrote it, if you can find them, or you wait and see if not (which would be the case if it was registered anyway, since you can’t predict whether they’re going to renew the thing).

Actually, another argument against requiring registration: it strongly favours big publishers, who know the rules and are used to filling in the paperwork, and makes life harder for individuals, especially in the case of unexpected success (“I didn’t bother registering it because it’s been a waste of time every other time and I didn’t expect it to get popular”). After ten years, you’ll have a fairer idea whether your work is of meaningful commercial value, for which the answer is normally “no”.

I think jedberg's point is that revenue generated is not being factored in.

So Disney, who effectively has a monopoly on certain popular content can copyright it for a long time because they're making so much money off of it, while a small time copyright owner who is making $10k a year will not be able to make money for very long.

I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. Depriving the public of free use should be compensated appropriately. The older it is the more it becomes part of our shared culture.

It makes sense that in some cases large players will be capable of realizing benefits from things at scales that small ones simply can't match. A small player could still presumably sell their copyright to a large one if it appeared lucrative to continue extending it.

It's a matter of balancing freedoms against monopolies in order to maximize innovation. Large players often enjoy intrinsic economic advantages and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing as long as it doesn't hurt consumers.

>It's a matter of balancing freedoms against monopolies in order to maximize innovation. Large players often enjoy intrinsic economic advantages and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing as long as it doesn't hurt consumers.

I wonder what other n-order consequences of this might be. The suggested approach will encourage small players to either focus on original content or compete with each other using public domain items. The big companies will buy or even rent out rights when original holders can't support the fee. This will happen around copyright fee increase breakpoints, the change of ownership will become more predictable, more pump and dump situations like with Star Wars happen to popular franchises. Predictable change of ownership will affect share prices, this will be in news all the time. If breakpoints will coincide with calendar years, the companies will try to maximize profits before the fee grows too much, resulting in super-competitive, choke full release schedules like what happens now around Christmas. We'll see weird variations of public domain content, like fan fiction, but on larger scale and more money for creators. Older, public domain content might see more demand thanks to derivative works it enables, and more demand means healthier content preservation efforts (more customers, more money to support the projects) and file sharing scene.

Moreover, Disney will just register its decade of works as a single multipart work, so this regime would encourage further monopolization

If that would be a vulnerability under my proposed scheme, it would already be a vulnerability now. But as it is, it’s already blocked by law surrounding copyright of compilations. Indeed, my scheme in my preferred form takes matters further so that if they tried to do what you suggest they’d be risking getting everything in the “single multipart work” declared public domain as soon as someone complains that some of those substantial “parts” were published long ago.

I generally like this, but think it can be bought for 5 years at a time. Yearly stuff is annoying for everyone. Agree copyright as written is maybe ok for a ten-ish year period. Maybe 5.

Could do roughly what most domain name registries do: you can renew for between one and ten years at a time. So if you wanted to pay for years 11–20 all at once, you’d just cough up your $1,133.30 in one go rather than paying it annually as $10, $15, $22.50, …, $384.43.

I honestly never thought I'd see someone citing the ICANN DNS system as an example of a good thing but in this case I agree, it fits.

It's an interesting point. Yearly is terrible for individuals but if you think about it for a tax such as this large blocks are just paying for the smaller pieces all at once. It probably doesn't make sense to offer discounts since the express purpose is to discourage holding the copyright in the first place.

> If you treat it as a tax (scaling by revenue or similar), it gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up.

Not if you treat it as a Harberger* tax. If you do that, the small-time writer gets to keep his characters for a pittance, but Disney pays royally for all their princesses.

* https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/9/1/51/3572441

I think the only time a Harberger tax makes sense is for illiquid investments, such as investment real estate. Everywhere else, the forced buying and selling creates more problems than it solves.

In this example of Disney's IP - it takes a lot of time and money to make a movie. A competitor to Disney could wait until they announce a new movie and then forcibly buy up enough rights to make the movie illegal to release. It encourages and creates a framework for sabotage among competitors.

The steady state is that one mega corp emerges victorious. Disney sets up a script that forcibly purchases any "super hero" adjacent IP. No small time creators would ever be allowed to exist, when large corporations are allowed to smother them so easily.

I also strongly disagree that this is the simpler option. Figuring out how to price your property and how often to re-asses would definitely bring about OP's concern of "gets messy, encourages dishonesty, and pretty much forces a new subindustry to spring up."

Pure Harberger taxes aren't a perfect fit for copyright--7 initial years free* is what one fan of the original paper proposed--but I can't see how, compared to existing copyright law, they encourage dishonesty, get messy, or require new industry (a sufficiently large IP company might shift some spending from lawyers to valuation and risk assessment).

> A competitor to Disney could wait until they announce a new movie and then forcibly buy up enough rights to make the movie illegal to release.

In a de novo work like Toy Story, or a fully licensed work like Wreck-It Ralph, Disney owns the rights and knows their value when they announce the upcoming film. The problem only occurs in cases like Lion King, where an existing folk story gets Disneyfied, with no compensation, and often no credit, to the cultural originator of the story.

I'm ok with Disney needing to pay extra money while their competitors pay extra taxes, in cases like this.

* https://ristret.com/s/ftmbkg/harberger_taxation_has_elegant

> but I can't see how, compared to existing copyright law, they encourage dishonesty, get messy, or require new industry.

The comparison was with OP's suggestion of replacing copyright with a simple tax, not with current copyright law. I agree Harberger taxes would be simpler than the existing system, though still not preferable.

> In a de novo work like Toy Story, or a fully licensed work like Wreck-It Ralph, Disney owns the rights and knows their value when they announce the upcoming film.

Sure, but a competitor could steal the rights out from under them in the time between announcing the film and the film hitting theaters.

There's another issue with not-yet-profitable IP. With Harberger taxes you wouldn't be able to protect IP while you're still working to build products around it. This is another way that smaller / new players get screwed with this type of system.

As I said, the forced buying / selling creates way more problems than it solves. All we are trying to do here is determine how high a tax should be. Inventing a scheme where people and companies can steal from each other (for a fee) is always going to have worse second order effects and be more complicated than just coming up with a price formula for the tax.

The “initial duration X free” I mentioned solves all these problems without producing very onerous complications. Even if it didn’t, a small creator could get immediate cash infusions simply by pricing his newly created characters at a large multiple of what he thinks he could make off them—that way, Disney’s buyout is a providential windfall instead of legal thievery.

I think you’re undercounting the benefits and overcounting the side effects of incentive compatible mechanisms!

> The “initial duration X free” I mentioned solves all these problems without producing very onerous complications.

I guess that depends on how you define it. All the marvel characters and stories have existed for decades. The only thing new about the movies are the movies themselves

> a small creator could get immediate cash infusions simply by pricing his newly created characters at a large multiple of what he thinks he could make off them—that way, Disney’s buyout is a providential windfall instead of legal thievery.

Yeah, and run the risk of bankrupting themselves from the tax bill in the process.

> We propose a remedy in the form of a tax on property, based on the value self-assessed by its owner at intervals, along with a requirement that the owner sell the property to any third party willing to pay a price equal to the self-assessed value.

I’m not convinced this would be a good fit for copyright in general, but it sounds very problematic for application to private persons in any field; in this case, your small-time writer would surely either overpay, or undervalue and have their work legally stolen from them by a Disney. Sounds like it’d favour the big entities that can play to the laws of averages.

But more generally, Harberger taxation seems a pretty cool concept, a genuine alternative to the current model of capitalism. I’m glad you mentioned it!

> or you could even ignore inflation altogether, which would slowly extend average copyright terms

Just what we need, a Disney incentivized to cause rampant inflation...

I originally thought of that in jest, but honestly putting money is more stable assets or other currencies and supporting and lobbying for inflationist policies would probably be in their best interest, and they're powerful enough that it probably wouldn't be a good thing.