Then what happens as humans solve aging and no one dies? There should be an age limit regardless of natural or corporate persons.

> Then what happens as humans solve aging and no one dies?

Then everything will change. Concepts like copyright would end up irrelevant.

> solve aging and no one dies

I believe this may be an HN bubble thing. Fusion energy will be commercialized hundreds if not thousands of years before that will be reality.

I was being slightly facetious ;). However it is something I've thought about before, what happens to societies when no one dies, whether we'll keep the same customs and societal opinions forever, etc.

You might enjoy Kurt Vonnegut’s short story 2BR02B. The Wikipedia article[1] has links to several different places you can read or listen to it for free. (Though I’m a bit confused as to how his work is already in the public domain since he only died relatively recently?)

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_B_R_0_2_B

It may have been published without a copyright notice? As it was published between 1927 and 1977, that would explain why it's in the public domain: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Hirtle_chart

Death and fusion will both be solved instantly once super human AI arrives.

Possibly because it will kill us all immediately but maybe it will solve those things for us.

You know what they say, give a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.

i think you're a little off the mark. Google Aubrey de Grey. Ageing isnt that tough of a problem

I feel like we can revisit when we reach this point :)

Melancholy Elephants, a Hugo-winning short story, answers that: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

I'd be fine with the extension path, but in exchange I'd expect a fee that increases with each extension. Almost like a land value tax but for IP.

That's a really interesting idea!

Perhaps the fee would be a base per times renewed plus the worth of a portion of the total reported wealth that the IP has generated over it's lifetime, instead of just since the last renewal. So if you've made sixty thousand dollars over the first twenty years, you owe six thousand for the renewal. If you've made ninety thousand dollars over the next twenty years, you owe ten thousand dollars plus eighteen thousand for the renewal. The base fee scales to make it feasible for low earners, but increases to prevent copyright abusers from perpetually milking an unused IP like how Harmony Gold did with Robotech/Macross for thirty eight years.

Harberger taxes on ip could be neat

This to me is the right answer: have an intellectual property tax which goes up every year. Disney can pay to keep Mickey locked up but all of the less popular IP shifts the calculation from “keep it, we might use it some day” to a more balanced calculation.

The other thing I’d like to add is some kind of requirement that works be available (e.g. it should cost a lot more if they want to hide it in a vault) but that would need care to avoid publishers screwing creators if there’s a dispute, as is not uncommon - you wouldn’t want the threat of putting something in the public domain to be used to force the creator to agree to unfavorable terms. Maybe something like all assignment contracts are unconditionally voided without compensation if the company chooses not to make an item available for sale/license at standard rates for more than n days in a 5 year period?

I like your idea a lot, but I'll admit I don't know what a standardized rate or one-size-fits-all solution looks like. Or, I have different expectations for HBO than I do for an individual artist producing works as a hobby.

I also wonder about the implications for the copyright status of a "limited edition" version of a work. I'm not sure how that would play out.

Yeah, there would definitely need to be some thresholds for things like lifetime revenue and use (e.g. you wouldn’t want a service trying to play silly games pretending that they didn’t collect revenue for a movie because it’s a complimentary to their members with some other purchase).

Limited editions are interesting, especially if they’re not something easily compared to a mainstream release. Maybe you’d need an appeal process where someone could get a special exception by the Copyright office under certain circumstances.