How would this system operate on an international level? Whom would foreign creators pay to have their work copyrighted in the US? If you let everyone pay their country's government but still respect their copyright internationally then the country with the lowest fees will see a huge volume of copyright offshoring. If you make everyone pay each country separately then copyrighting one's work will suddenly become expensive for individuals and $properties not being registered on $island will be exploited.

You could just do it like they do for various taxes. You register in every country but you can deduct the fee already paid to another country from what you owe, so the total amount you pay is equal to the fee from the country with the highest fee that you've registered in.

It should be easy to automate this electronically to the point where you upload a copy of the work and check the box for every country you want to register in and it does them all at the same time.

Or you could just have every country charge the same fee and let people register in their home countries to much the same effect.

And I'm not sure what you're talking about with being exploited on $island. You can imagine about the same thing happening there as happens in countries that already don't have copyright enforcement, i.e. nobody cares because nobody there has any real money anyway. It's not like they can export to countries where the copyright is registered.

Agreed in principle. I think the initial slope should be a little lower but after about 30 years things should REALLY start to take off. So maybe $10 a year for the first 15 years and then double it every year thereafter.

He's proposing $7 _total_ for the first 15 years. ($1 for the first five, $2 for the next five, and $4 for the final five years.)

Graph the two of them and get back to me. I'm talking about the slope. I do realize that the total sum is basically trivial either way. But slope is an actual mathematical term and I used it as such.

Then why should the initial slope be lower? If the total sum is trivial it seems it shouldn't matter

To pre-emptively deny the reform opponent (read "Disney lackey") the opportunity to scare monger people by trotting out the "it's exponential!!" argument.

If it's a flat fee for the first 15 or 30 years then it should take a lot of wind out of their sails.

If people start doing the math and saying "but at 60 years this is completely insane!" then just ask for a list of affected stakeholders that this would bankrupt. I suspect the only people on the list would be Disney.

I think five year increments might be a little short, but I agree with the general idea. One of the biggest problems with indefinite copyrights is that you wind up with big chunks of culture that get sucked up into this copyright black hole. They are too locked up to safely use, but it's difficult or impossible to tell why might actually own the rights. Then it's only a matter of time before large sections of our cultural past fade away forever.

"At the 150 year mark Disney can decide for themselves whether another 5 years is worth a billion dollars."

That's one reason that the plan would fail. One of the reasons I like explicit registration is that allowing these sorts of indefinite extensions for some works makes it less likely that companies would lobby heavily against the plans. By making it deliberatively punitive for these scenarios, you put the plan up against the same forces that are already fighting (and successfully, at that) for blanket copyright extensions.

It might not work the same. Disney's lobbying in this scenario would probably have to take the form of "We, a gigantic and highly profitable corporation, want to unfairly pay less money." I'd say this is less likely to work than the current "Protect the artists!" approach. Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough at how it could be spun.