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.
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.