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Originally Posted by SensualPoet
It's a pity we aren't evolving to a new place, given the amount of content on the Internet and the relative ease of access to more every day.
I'd like to see something more flexible: 20 year authorship copyright from date of creation / initial publication, renewable every ten years for up to 50 years from creation. Works being renewed would be required to be deposited in a global repository. Those not actively protecting their rights would have copyright lapse after 20, 30, 40 and finally and permanently, after 50 years.
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That bids fair to become a record keeping nightmare. Talk to the folks at Project Gutenberg about "Rule 6" clearances on works copyrighted in the US before it became a signatory to the Berne convention, and the hoops they have to jump through to be relatively confident some works
are now in the public domain. (And look at the fun and games because the same work may be both in the public domain and copyrighted: works got published as serials in magazines, and
that copyright lapsed, but the book version is still under copyright...)
Right now, it's simple: either life + 50 years or life + 70 years, depending upon where you live. And you don't need to do formal registration to
have copyright: that exists automatically upon creation of the work. Registration is still advisable in many cases because it establishes a formal date from which copyright applies, and allows for recovery of larger damages in the case of infringement.
Copyright was created in the first place to encourage creators, by giving them an exclusive right to benefit from their creations, and copyright period is intended to benefir the author and the author's heirs.
Going to a 20 years, plus renewals every ten years, re-introduces the whole idea of formal registration to have copyright. Who keeps the records? With whom do you renew? How do you do so, and what does it cost?
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Copyright would continue to apply to the written word, speech, recordings, photos, moving images, etc. Characters, like Mickey Mouse, could be protected as trademarks; but whole works, like Fantasia, could not. However, Disney could control the source material and watermark, etc, of any copies -- plus continue to be the "authentic authoritative source" for such works after PD applies, including adding newer material which would, of course, have its own 50 year span. By packaging new material with PD, it could effectively "add new value" and continue to "monetize" its original lapsed copyright material.
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Look more closely at trademark law before you make that assumption. It's a lot more complex than copyright. Taking Mickey as an example, he's undergone significant changes since the original "Steamboat Willie", and I very much doubt a trademark would protect all of them.
The general advice is that yes, you
can theoretically file for a trademark on your own, but you really don't
want to. If it's valuable enough to trademark, you really want a lawyer to help you navigate the process.
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Dennis