I think a happy comprimise would be 14 years, plus the right to renew copyright forever, in 14 year increments. With the caveat being that there is a fee to extend. Which would be roughly $5,000 in todays money. But it’s tied to some percentage of the ecconomy. So as inflation hits, maybe 10 years from now it’s $10,000. But $10,000 10 years from now spends more like $5,000 today.
Make it low enough that original creators can always renew…but high enough that major companies might think “but why bother?”
So Mickey Mouse would still be public domain, and that’s fine, because it’s literally Disneys face of the company. So to them $5,000 is chump change. But they might not bother with Mr Bogedy. Despite Mickey Mouse coming out in the 1920s, and Mr Bogedy coming out in the 1980s.
Basically I want the case to be “If the creators still care enough to renew, they can.”
But they need to actually keep putting effort and money into it. So you can’t just renew a bunch of projects that won’t make you money. You gotta WANT it.
Unfortunately I think this would have the opposite effect. Individuals would have to weigh the benefits of renewing their copyright vs. buying groceries, while companies could, as you note, write off the fees as chump change.
So (for instance), next year, John Green would have to try to decide whether he should pay to renew the copyright on his massive 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, while Disney wouldn’t think twice about renewing the copyright on box office flop Tomorrowland in a couple years, just on the off-chance that it might someday be popular.
Instead, I think copyright should be an initial 14-year term with the option to renew twice at no charge; but the catch would be, only individuals and groups could hold and renew copyright. Copyright could not be owned by, assigned to, sold to, or administrated by any corporate entity, only by an individual and their heirs. Work-for-hire would come with an automatic blanket license assignment for the duration of the first copyright term, but following that? Better keep Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft happy if you want to make any Toy Story sequels, Disney. And if you don’t, they can take the characters to DreamWorks after 14 years.
It gets sticky with movies themselves, since you essentially have a group of hundreds or even thousands of people to coordinate the license terms for, but I’m sure some sort of voting system or trust could be put in place. Yes, it could be manipulated, but hardly more than it already is.
The bottom line is, authors and creators (and their families) should be able to make money off of their creation for a reasonable amount of time, but also adult creators should be able to make adaptations of media that they enjoyed as children. Balancing those two things isn’t as hard as companies have convinced Congress it is.
You make some valid points, but I think with so many properties at play, sure ONE title would be chump change for Disney. But imagine the thoussnds of properties they own. Let’s go low. Lets say disney owns 1000 IPs. I know the real number is mucb higher, but I’m keeping it simple for concepts sake.
So 1,000 IPs x 5,000 per IP. That’s 5,000,000 in fees.
Now lets say only 400 of those IPs are making any money at all. The other 600 are just burning money every 14 years and dormant. It also costs them in other ways. Ever wonder why Disney doesn’t just upload every single piece of obscure media it already owns to Disney+? It’s because hosting is expensive. So them hosting some obscure non-mickey mouse cartoon from the 1940s would cost them copyright fees AND server costs.
Eventually Disney would say “hey, we can free up 3,000,000 just in fees alone, plus additional costs of hosting fees would be gone too!”
Whereas individuals, I don’t think it would be a case of choosing between food and copyright. If you know for 14 years the renewal is coming, just save $34 a month x 150 months = 5,100. 14 years is 168 months for reference.
$5 million is less than 0.2% of the Disney company’s annual income. They probably spend more than that on copy paper.
That $34 a month for an individual, on the other hand, could be the cost of a prescription, or a phone bill, or something like that. It’s a more significant amount of money than it seems, especially since authors aren’t typically rolling in money.
Yeah, I think Disney would be perfectly happy paying that sort of fee to keep those IPs locked away. The very last thing they’d want is to let something go, and then some time later discover that someone else has turned it into a valuable product. Not only are they losing out on that profit but now there’s a competitor out there. Better to just sit on those IPs forever.
If you instead start jacking the price up year after year until it costs billions to keep an IP copyrighted, why not simply declare it public domain at that point and be done with it? I think a hard cutoff makes a lot more sense. And that way nobody needs to go rummaging around through registries to see if they can use any little thing, they just need to know when it was first published.
One problem with your idea is, what constitutes a “work” for the purpose of renewing copyright? Currently, a single photograph and a two-hour movie that cost $$$ to make are both “works”. Charging $5000 to renew the copyright on an individual photo will bankrupt people who make a living doing stock photography, but it’s peanuts for a large movie studio. You could create a category of “small works”, like individual photographs or short stories, that can be batched together so that you pay only one fee to renew a group of them, but flat-fee-per-work under the current definition will cause problems for some classes of individual creators.
Personally, I think we need to tear the whole thing down and start over. Base copyright on individual works on a “use it or lose it” system—as long as copies of a work remain available for purchase (not rental—streaming or DRM-gated access is not sufficient) from the copyright holder at a reasonable price, they have exclusive rights to it. Stop publishing the work, and it lands in the public domain within 5-10 years. This needs to be accompanied by substantial reforms on how derivative works and trademarked characters are handled—we need a universal mechanical licensing system with a central clearinghouse that allows anyone to create a derivative work for a flat fee or percentage of revenue, and an official, legally-binding system for indicating “this derivative work was not created by the trademark holder”. (Figuring out how rights on unpublished works function in this schema is something I still need to work through, but they’re not a major concern for 99% of people.)
I think a happy comprimise would be 14 years, plus the right to renew copyright forever, in 14 year increments. With the caveat being that there is a fee to extend. Which would be roughly $5,000 in todays money. But it’s tied to some percentage of the ecconomy. So as inflation hits, maybe 10 years from now it’s $10,000. But $10,000 10 years from now spends more like $5,000 today.
Make it low enough that original creators can always renew…but high enough that major companies might think “but why bother?”
So Mickey Mouse would still be public domain, and that’s fine, because it’s literally Disneys face of the company. So to them $5,000 is chump change. But they might not bother with Mr Bogedy. Despite Mickey Mouse coming out in the 1920s, and Mr Bogedy coming out in the 1980s.
Basically I want the case to be “If the creators still care enough to renew, they can.”
But they need to actually keep putting effort and money into it. So you can’t just renew a bunch of projects that won’t make you money. You gotta WANT it.
Unfortunately I think this would have the opposite effect. Individuals would have to weigh the benefits of renewing their copyright vs. buying groceries, while companies could, as you note, write off the fees as chump change.
So (for instance), next year, John Green would have to try to decide whether he should pay to renew the copyright on his massive 2012 hit The Fault in Our Stars, while Disney wouldn’t think twice about renewing the copyright on box office flop Tomorrowland in a couple years, just on the off-chance that it might someday be popular.
Instead, I think copyright should be an initial 14-year term with the option to renew twice at no charge; but the catch would be, only individuals and groups could hold and renew copyright. Copyright could not be owned by, assigned to, sold to, or administrated by any corporate entity, only by an individual and their heirs. Work-for-hire would come with an automatic blanket license assignment for the duration of the first copyright term, but following that? Better keep Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft happy if you want to make any Toy Story sequels, Disney. And if you don’t, they can take the characters to DreamWorks after 14 years.
It gets sticky with movies themselves, since you essentially have a group of hundreds or even thousands of people to coordinate the license terms for, but I’m sure some sort of voting system or trust could be put in place. Yes, it could be manipulated, but hardly more than it already is.
The bottom line is, authors and creators (and their families) should be able to make money off of their creation for a reasonable amount of time, but also adult creators should be able to make adaptations of media that they enjoyed as children. Balancing those two things isn’t as hard as companies have convinced Congress it is.
You make some valid points, but I think with so many properties at play, sure ONE title would be chump change for Disney. But imagine the thoussnds of properties they own. Let’s go low. Lets say disney owns 1000 IPs. I know the real number is mucb higher, but I’m keeping it simple for concepts sake.
So 1,000 IPs x 5,000 per IP. That’s 5,000,000 in fees.
Now lets say only 400 of those IPs are making any money at all. The other 600 are just burning money every 14 years and dormant. It also costs them in other ways. Ever wonder why Disney doesn’t just upload every single piece of obscure media it already owns to Disney+? It’s because hosting is expensive. So them hosting some obscure non-mickey mouse cartoon from the 1940s would cost them copyright fees AND server costs.
Eventually Disney would say “hey, we can free up 3,000,000 just in fees alone, plus additional costs of hosting fees would be gone too!”
Whereas individuals, I don’t think it would be a case of choosing between food and copyright. If you know for 14 years the renewal is coming, just save $34 a month x 150 months = 5,100. 14 years is 168 months for reference.
$5 million is less than 0.2% of the Disney company’s annual income. They probably spend more than that on copy paper.
That $34 a month for an individual, on the other hand, could be the cost of a prescription, or a phone bill, or something like that. It’s a more significant amount of money than it seems, especially since authors aren’t typically rolling in money.
Yeah, I think Disney would be perfectly happy paying that sort of fee to keep those IPs locked away. The very last thing they’d want is to let something go, and then some time later discover that someone else has turned it into a valuable product. Not only are they losing out on that profit but now there’s a competitor out there. Better to just sit on those IPs forever.
If you instead start jacking the price up year after year until it costs billions to keep an IP copyrighted, why not simply declare it public domain at that point and be done with it? I think a hard cutoff makes a lot more sense. And that way nobody needs to go rummaging around through registries to see if they can use any little thing, they just need to know when it was first published.
One problem with your idea is, what constitutes a “work” for the purpose of renewing copyright? Currently, a single photograph and a two-hour movie that cost $$$ to make are both “works”. Charging $5000 to renew the copyright on an individual photo will bankrupt people who make a living doing stock photography, but it’s peanuts for a large movie studio. You could create a category of “small works”, like individual photographs or short stories, that can be batched together so that you pay only one fee to renew a group of them, but flat-fee-per-work under the current definition will cause problems for some classes of individual creators.
Personally, I think we need to tear the whole thing down and start over. Base copyright on individual works on a “use it or lose it” system—as long as copies of a work remain available for purchase (not rental—streaming or DRM-gated access is not sufficient) from the copyright holder at a reasonable price, they have exclusive rights to it. Stop publishing the work, and it lands in the public domain within 5-10 years. This needs to be accompanied by substantial reforms on how derivative works and trademarked characters are handled—we need a universal mechanical licensing system with a central clearinghouse that allows anyone to create a derivative work for a flat fee or percentage of revenue, and an official, legally-binding system for indicating “this derivative work was not created by the trademark holder”. (Figuring out how rights on unpublished works function in this schema is something I still need to work through, but they’re not a major concern for 99% of people.)