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I was thinking that copyright should perhaps be limited to some time + a function of you continuing to create work. So Disney gets to keep Mickey so long as th
by caw 13y ago
I was thinking that copyright should perhaps be limited to some time + a function of you continuing to create work.
So Disney gets to keep Mickey so long as they keep using Mickey, JK Rowling keeps Harry Potter so long as she's still writing books and keeping the world up, and the same with Star Wars. However, if nothing new comes out between extensions it falls into public domain. That would catch all the books, 1 hit wonders, orphaned video games (heh, maybe Half Life would be public domain with the wait for HL3), etc.
Not a fully fleshed out idea (What about after death, if your kids kept up your bestselling X, or if you released a 10th edition of your horrible book with "THE END" added), but it's an idea.
- venomsnake 13y agoActually something similar to that was the US system prior to the 60s. You had to register copyright and you had to renew it every few years. So you had to be proactive.
- Avenger42 13y agoThen you have authors releasing a short story and claiming that's all that's necessary to keep up the copyright. Mickey appears as a cameo in a Disney film and he's back in the vault for another 10 years. (Actually, he's still active in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so he's likely to never make it into the public domain.)
- caw 13y agoIs this much different than the current system of life + every changing number when Mickey is going to expire? This small change wouldn't impact the big corporations, but it would start letting smaller things fall into public domain. Then, after a while of acceptance, you do something like limit the number of renewals, make it price prohibitive to renew more than 2-3 times, or limit transferability. Or you could go for a big bang change and hope you have a critical mass of votes.