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In my opinion, the best solution for everyone involved is to allow companies to renew copyrights annually into perpetuity after an initial period, but charge a

• josho 9y ago
  Interesting idea. Except Disney would pay tens of millions to keep the original Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. Hell they might even pay much more to guard against weakening their brand. So, While your idea ensures public domain for many works I fear it extends the biggest players their perpetual rights because they can afford it as a result of their scale.
  • plorkyeran 9y ago
    Disney is already paying tens of millions to do that. The proposal is mostly to make them not keep everything else locked away too.
    • djsumdog 9y ago
      Yes, in lobbying costs. And their lobbying efforts hurt the rest of the industry. I really think Mickey, Donald and Goofy should be allowed to enter the public domain. Companies need to grow and old things need to be shared in the commons. They'll lose some initial money of course, if everyone could produce Mickey Mouse shirts, but Disney et. al. would have to come up with new tricks, new icons and try to make new things instead of the constant barrage of rehashed garbage media we get today.
      • kbenson 9y ago
        It's not the shirts that are the problem, it's a massive I Flux of random Mickey Mouse media that would saturate the market and dilute the media. Do any of us really doubt that there would be a bunch of Mickey Mouse porn? I'm not in favor of long copyrights, but I think in the case there would be a real cultural loss if there was unfettered access to this particular icon. Does that justify full control by Disney at this late stage? Probably not, but some middle ground with increasing costs (maybe an increasing percentage of profit from that brand?) might be worth trying. The whole system is pretty messed up at this point, so why not test out some interesting ideas? As a side benefit, maybe Disney and others like them won't fight it quite so hard, as it would be costly but not the existential threat to their core brand they see come up every couple evades.
        • yorwba 9y ago
          There already are lots of random Mickey Mouse media, they just aren't legal to sell in any place that respects Disney's copyright. But Rule 34 says that Mickey Mouse porn is out there, and some of it is probably legal (e.g. using a costume purchased in a Disney-licensed store as a fetish item).
          • djsumdog 9y ago
            Mickey Mouse porn is probably legal in the US too; if you wanted to try and argue that it's protected as parody or satire. I mean we have porn versions of Pirates of the Caribbean as well as Rick and Morty (Dick and Morty .. it's actually pretty hilarious)
            • bighi 9y ago
              The porn version of pirates of the caribbean, as far as I remember, doesn't use the name "Pirates of the Caribbean". Also doesn't use the name of important characters.
        • josho 9y ago
          > cultural loss if there was unfettered access to this particular icon As a counter argument look at Snow White. That story is in the public domain. I think you’d be hard pressed to make a case that that has harmed society. Regardless Disney will continue to have a trademark on the Mouse. So, it will continue to be a cultural icon for the company. We’ll just also have steamboat Willie generics in the marketplace as well.
  • fatbird 9y ago
    Arguably, this is a good deal, especially if the renewal fees go to further public good like archiving of public domain works. Disney would pay tens of millions to keep Mickey, Goofy, and Donald under copyright, but they'll quickly triage their renewal budget and let most everything else go. The greater damage from blanket copyright extension is the long tail of works that no one would pay to keep copyright on, but are still protected with the same inflexible term as an ongoing piece of IP like Mickey.
  • gutnor 9y ago
    Normally the bigger players are at least investing in their brand. Mickey Mouse is not a hidden asset locked in a vault, it is everywhere for everyone to see. Not ideal maybe but worth it to unlock the ton of asset that lies unexploited and will never be exploited because the generation that has some sort of emotional attachment to it has disappeared (retired or dead) by the time they could use it. The problem is still with the concentration of the media. There is no price you can put that Disney cannot bulk pay for everything they own that wouldn't be destroying any competition from the little copyright holders. So in effect it could decrease competition with the only upside of increasing the government income.
  • to3m 9y ago
    Start the fee at $1 and double it each year?
    • bighi 9y ago
      The US is allowing Disney to become a behemoth of a company without competitors, so even if the price rises up to a million trillion gajillion dollars they would be able to pay without much effort.
      • ric2b 9y ago
        Under his proposal after 45 years they would be paying the entire US GDP. Global GDP before the 50 year mark.
    • ric2b 9y ago
      That sounds like a pretty cool idea. After 30 years if it's not generating $1B a year you let it go. That would make most creations pretty cheap to keep for the first 15 years, corporation level expensive from 15 years to 25 years and global phenomenon level only after 30 years. If that sounds too aggressive maybe double it only every 2 years.
  • hinkley 9y ago
    Mickey and Winnie the Pooh make Disney tens of billions a year. They should trademark them, instead of relying on copyright.
    • LoSboccacc 9y ago
      copyright covers derivative work better
• caf 9y ago
  Wouldn't they just lobby to reduce the fees once they ratcheted up too high?
  • barrkel 9y ago
    This is a universal argument against all copyright reform.
    • reificator 9y ago
      And simultaneously the most important argument in favor of copyright reform.
  • ajmurmann 9y ago
    It's awful how the damn mouse is completely poisoning the discussion. There are thousands and thousands of works that aren't entering the public domain. Many movies or older video games are actually inaccessible today because the copyright situation is unclear because for example done doing got used that now world need to get relicensed in order to make the work available and/or it's unclear who to even talk to about that. If non action would move works into public domain a huge part of all those works would be in the public domain and a big part of the problem would be solved. Instead not only is Disney poisoning the well because they care deeply about one particular extreme case of copyright that's still valuable to them, but the entire discussion is hard to have without people bringing up the stupid edge case that's the mouse and derailing the discussion with what's really a very small part of the issue at hand.
    • CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
      Even if non action would move thing to the public domain. How would you know? It seems to me that the uncertainties would still remain. As you say it might even be unclear who to talk to. How would I protect my self from liability? I mean we’ve had free software licenses of various kinds for quite a few years now, and lawyers are still uneasy about the whole thing.
      • 9y ago
• shmerl 9y ago
  Better to simply lower the term and not allow extending it.
  • imtringued 9y ago
    That's a pipe dream. It's never going to happen.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • shmerl 9y ago
      Put pressure on the legislative power. And it will happen.
      • ric2b 9y ago
        How many billions of dollars does "pressure" mean?
        • shmerl 9y ago
          Just enough as not to vote for those who support this garbage.
• acjohnson55 9y ago
  Why bother? Why should we allow entities to continue to monopolize intellectual property long after the actual innovators are dead? If Disney's so great, they should be able to come up with some new shit. Otherwise, they're just sucking up oxygen. These rules are being abused to stifle innovation and competition, simple as that. I don't have any problem in principle of some exponential scale, but it just seems like a solution for a non-problem.
  • RhodesianHunter 9y ago
    Because the best solution to a problem is rarely to swing your approach to the opposite extreme. That inevitably leads to more problems. Let's take a few steps in the right direction and see what happens?
    • wutbrodo 9y ago
      This is a strawman. Note that the parent comment says "why should we allow entities to monopolize IP _long after the creators are dead". Reducing copyright length to a more sane level would prevent exactly this: How on earth is arresting and mildly reversing the ceaseless march of extended copyright terms "swinging to the opposite extreme?"
      • imtringued 9y ago
        It's quite simple. Disney and other companies have enough power to influence the law. If you change the law to something more reasonable they will just change it back. It is extreme in the sense that current copyright extremely favours major companies. Going the opposite way extremely disfavours major companies with IP that spans centuries. You have to find a compromise so that both companies and everyone else is happy with. The compromise is simple. Allow copyright extensions indefinitively on an individual basis in exchange for a fee. If mickeymouse is profitable to disney then let them have it. They will get it at any cost anyway and destroy a lot of things in the process. Sacrificing perpetually profitable IP is a small cost in exchange for all the works that are no longer profitable which is probably more than 99% of all works.
• CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
  Someone here on HN suggested to watch a popular tv-show with the laughs removed from the soundtrack. When this is an easy and _legal_ thing to do (perhaps a link from the author of that comment to YouTube). I’ll say we’re starting to see a working copyright law. I’m not sure a perpetual renewal helps with that. OTOH another issue a new law should address is how to make sure originals of a work are preserved for the public at all. Original recordings of music albums f.ex. So perhaps a required registration, bundled with a way to save an original work could be a good thing. It would be like the coyleft licenses that require the work in its “preferred” from to be made available.
• jandrese 9y ago
  This basically turns it into a tax. You are saying that it will make more money for you than it costs to renew the fee. This would cause the vast majority of copyright held works to fall into the public domain even if the fee is very small. I'm in favor of making the fee increase exponential though, just to make sure the things do eventually end up in the public domain. Say the first 20 years are free. Next 10 years are some nominal fee, maybe a couple of hundred bucks, but then you have to renew every 10 years and the fee increases one order of magnitude each time. Would Disney be willing to pay 20 billion dollars to keep Star Wars out of the public domain in 2077? Of course a billion dollars might be pocket change by then, who knows?
  • nine_k 9y ago
    Why, start with e.g. $1 the first year, and double it each subsequent year. For Star Wars, even after 25 years the sum would still be worth paying; maybe even after 30. For the vast majority of other commercially successful works, the original 20 years would probably be a very reasonable cutoff: few would generate seriously more than $1M in revenue to justify the copyright extension. Same should apply to patents.
    • jandrese 9y ago
      IMHO making the payment every year would start to get onerous. Maybe it's premature optimization but I was thinking that keeping the timeline to once per decade would fall roughly in line with the pace at which Copyright systems normally move. It's also a "big government" idea, but having a central database for copywritten works would be a boon IMHO. It could have the year of creation, author, and a price with a contact/payment system for using the work instead of the huge hodgepodge we have now. I don't think anybody would disagree that finding the actual rights holders and negotiating licenses is anything but a nightmare on older works. It could also keep a copy of the original work for release when the copyright expires, the same way the Library of Congress keeps a copy of every book. Storage requirements would be high, but they could be paid through the fees people pay to keep their stuff in copyright. This would also mean a return to explicitly registering for copyright on a work, but IMHO that's a good thing. If you don't care enough to register why should the government care enough to protect your work? Registration should be dead simple, upload a copy/good description of the work to your copyright account and bam, you're registered. The only requirement on the upload is that the format must not be locked or proprietary, there must be an open/free viewer available. Downside of this system is that it's massive. Just absolutely enormous. Makes healthcare.gov look like a Geocities page. Huge number of man hours to maintain it every year. It ends up being the cultural database of the US very quickly.