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.
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.