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.