Once upon a time, the Statute of Anne provided for a fixed copyright term of 14 years, extensible (if the copyright holder was still alive) for an additional term of 14 years.
Since then, copyright terms have ballooned to the point where:
- in the US, nothing now in copyright will enter the public domain until 2019;
- outside the US, HathiTrust, JSTOR and other content providers aren’t willing to give us access to material published after ~1872 (In New Zealand, 1872 material would only still be in copyright if an author who published when they were 20 lived to over 100);
- we’re wondering whether the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations will make things even worse.
But how do you fight the Mickey Mouse Protection Act?
What I’d love to see is to go back to a copyright term of 14 years, but allow it to be renewed for additional terms of 14 years as many times as the copyright holder wants, as long as the copyright holder applies for the renewal before the expiry of the 14 years. (Maybe throw in a small renewal fee – say, the cost to the consumer of one full-priced copy of the work in question.) This would:
- Get a whole heap of stuff into the public domain where it belongs;
- Remove all incentive for large companies to repeatedly lobby for law changes;
- Deal once and for all with the orphan works problem.
So Mickey Mouse would be in copyright forever; I don’t care, let them protect themselves into obscurity. The important thing is that it would stop them forcing the rest of us to starve the public domain as well.
This is good, but I don’t think things should be copyrighted forever – our culture belongs to us more than it does to the great great great grandchildren of the creators. (Or the shareholders of the company that bought the rights from the company that bought the rights from the company that employed the creators.)
A similar suggestion I’ve seen is that the renewal fee becomes (exponentially?) more expensive each time. That way something hugely popular like Mickey Mouse can be milked for 10s of years, but not 100s or more, and most things would be returned to the public domain after 1-3 terms.
The model you propose is much like domain name renewal: you pay for it as long as you want it. Eric Raymond would say that one should be able to homestead ideas that have been abandoned, take copyright over when someone lets it lapse (Homesteading the Noosphere). I think that’s libertarian tosh.
@dakvid: I don’t think things should be copyrighted forever, I’m just in a cynical mood that assumes that the companies are going to mess with the law to achieve that anyway so let’s make a law that can at least mitigate the damage…. But an exponential increase in renewal fee might be sly enough to slip by.
@Kindeliser: The idea of homesteading copyright is an abomination. But I’m going to make a list of things I want to bags just in case.