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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Then go yell at Disney. Without them, I think originally copyright was domething like 20 years.
Which means this year Greg the Bunny would be public domain. What? You never heard of Greg the Bunny??? Go ask Seth Green about that. Or ask Fox why you never heard of him.
At one point Fox canceled like 20 other shows, with Greg the Bunny being one of them, between the time Fox cancelled Family Guy, and the time they brought back Family guy. All 20 of these shows ran for like 1 seaaon, or less. Andy Richter had Andy Richter Controls the Universe. I think The Tick was part of that. Ironically starring the guy who Voices Joe from Family Guy. And I think 2004 was also the year they cancelled That 70s Show. I know that one lasted way longer that 1 season, but it would mean that Fox Cancels Family Guy. Then cancels shows starring Mila Kunis, Seth Green, and Patrick Warburton all in the same year. Then brings back Family guy.
Fox is a weird company.
The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total. It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows. There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.
In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.
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.
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.)