Rather than have them be for fixed periods, have the registration fee increase quickly. Want a 5 year copyright? Sure $100 registration. Another 5 years? $1000. Another 5 years? $10,000.

This results in highly profitable media still being in copyright, but basically everything falls out somewhere close to the year 25 1m renewal mark, or soon after.

Also, you have to give a few master copies to the copyright authority, so that it's less likely for the media to become lost.

That model would exclude all of the businesses that aren’t profitable or hold the patent for reasons that aren’t money related.

I think a lot of people would consider it unfair

Like.what. I hear this a lot but not much way of real examples.

You hold on to.copyright of.a song you sang when you were 8 and isnt making any money? So what ?

what's the downside here?

People who have more money can keep longer copyrights easier. That's the problem.

if they're making enough money off of it that they can afford the fees, then it's working as intended.

I think that for the person who suggested the idea, this would be considered success--creative products that aren't being actively used should revert to the commons.

But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.

Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.

Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.

The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.

On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.

The US had to much looser copyright terms until it tried to align with the Berne Convention. So there are minimum copyright terms that the US must comply by. US only joined the Berne Convention in 1989.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/05/13/why-did-the-unite...

Excellent point. To which I point out: we have exited various agreements before.

Why should trademarks expire? If I'm doing business as Bob's Company, and I spend 15 years building up my good name and it's known for doing quality work, why should someone be able to come in and claim that they're also Bob's Company, just because some time has passed?

Why should companies live forever? If they have 'personhood' then they need to die at some point... otherwise we have cancerous monstrosities we see currently. That is what happens when any component of something larger (society) lives too long, hogging resources while killing the host.

20 years for trademark is negotiable. That there needs to be an expiration date is not.

As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.

The problem I have is with trademarks being used as nouns but somehow not becoming generic. I searched "Velcro" on Amazon.co.uk. The best selling item is Velcro branded "Stick On". What even is a "stick on"? No reasonable consumer would identify that as a hook and loop fastener without context. "Hook and loop" isn't even written on the front of the packaging. The "Velcro" trademark is clearly functioning as a noun, which means from an ethical point of view it should be generic.

>As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.

You are a mark; you are a rube; you have been rooked. there is absolutely nothing about a trademark that remotely implies a continuity of ownership, certainly not of production quality. see what happened to pyrex, brand loyalty to their trademark from rubes is the only thing going for them any more

If there were no trademarks you wouldn't even know this happened.

It sounds like the only companies you are familiar with are ones large enough to capture markets, bribe politicians, and write regulations in their favor.

Well, small and mid-size businesses are easy to miss if you work from home or live in a big city. They don't wield anything like the kind of power you describe. But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs. You may want to stop and consider the value of multi-generational family-owned businesses.

>But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs.

wrong again, small businesses do not account for even 45% of US gdp. sorry to hear your jet ski rental isn't doing well

Most companies don’t live forever. But I don’t see any value in having a mandatory expiration for trademark, and several downsides. If the TM expires on a popular brand of beer, for example, then there will be competitors flooding the market with other beers that may or may not actually have the same taste or quality. How does that benefit the public? It sounds more punitive against companies than positive for the public.

because of the fraud that enables. If I'm used to getting quality widgets from bob's widget factory, I don't want to go to the store one day and buy a bob's widget and have it be something completely different.

Mark Twain had a lot to say about copyright. One of his arguments was that if he worked hard and built a business it would help support his children & descendants for, perhaps, generations. But he was an author and creator and felt that all of his hard labor should be able to support his family after his death. iuf Copyright was only 5 or 10 years then when it expires any publisher could print a artists books or recordings or whatnot... suddenly creators lose access to all royalty income and some dirtbag publisher is collecting all of the coin. Copyright might be inconvenient for some but for many others it is essential to making even a modest income.

> One of his arguments was that if he worked hard and built a business it would help support his children & descendants for, perhaps, generations. But he was an author and creator and felt that all of his hard labor should be able to support his family after his death.

You'd have to be seriously arrogant to believe that your labour should support multiple generations of your family.

Why? Shouldn't that be the dream for anyone with a family, and is indeed the case for many people?

I don't have any copyrights or trademarks or anything, but if I did I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo who only wants to use my work to pad their own wallets.

> I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo

Those aren't the only two options. If your copyright expired after a few years, your work would simply go into public domain, freely accessible to anyone. (The ones to "reap its benefits" at that point would be the general public.)

> Why?

The amount of money a single person spends throughout their lifetime generally orientates itself on the amount of money a single person earns throughout their lifetime. (We earn significantly more than 50 years ago, but we also spend a lot more, because our standards rose accordingly.)

If you expect your money to support the lives of multiple people (generations even), you are implying that your labour is worth multiple times as much as the labour of others. That is arrogant.

(I don't claim it should be actively prevented to make such large amounts of money. But we shouldn't legally limit people's access to literature just so a few authors can create a dynasty.)

Cool, now work through the impact of 5 year copyright on open source licenses.

It would explode as public domain works accumulate?

I don’t see any value in expiring Trademark. What’s the public benefit there?

Five years is a bit too short. Maybe five years automatic and then require renewals up to 25 years. It’d be good to have different terms for different types of things: software should be shorter, films or books should be longer terms.

All the good names get locked up forever?

Trademarks have to be renewed already. Why make them eternal?

They’re “good” because they’re associated with a company or product people are positive about. How does it help me if the trademark expires on a brand I like and ten other companies push out similar but not the same product? All the IP expired, so they use identical names, art, etc. How do customers distinguish?

Right, that's why they expire. I was asking why some appear to want eternal TMs

I think it's absurd that patents are so short lived compared to copyright.