Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
JoeBill, you bring up a good point about copyright extension. The corporate mentality on copyright is this. If it has even the slightest potential to make money, they want to keep it under copyright so they can cash cow it until it's bled drier than a desert. They also want to do that to ensure that when it goes into the public domain, if it ever does, nobody else will be able to make any money off it as it'll be spent beyond recovery.
It's the idea of the rental car and the tank of gas. People who rent cars tend to return them with an empty tank of gas because they want to ensure that they use up every drop of fuel they put into it, plus whatever was there when they got it, because they don't want the next poor schmuck to get any of their gas. I know of people who used to drive rental cars back to the rental place with gas tanks that were on fumes. The only reason that practice stopped was because the rental companies started charging people for cars that were returned without full tanks. If they had to fill the tank or top it off, you paid like $5 a gallon. Sometimes you paid $10. Trust me, when that happened, that practice came to an abrupt halt. lol.
So in order to get the copyright holders to stop constantly extending copyrights and milking brands until they're unrecoverably dead, I think congress needs to enact a tax on copyrights older than 10 years. And not just a little tax. I'm talking something that hurts. Like 20%-50% of gross revenues per year on each copyrighted item that has not been released into the public domain after 10 years. Trust me, if they could somehow get that kind of law passed (which, given how corrupt congress is, I feel would be highly unlikely to ever happen), you would see companies dumping older copyrights like the plague.
The only way they could get around that is to completely reinvent the brand every 10 years, which IMHO, is actually good, because it keeps them from cash cowing older brands and forces them to come up with either new things, or new ways of doing older things every 10 years. Take Disney's movie "Tangled". It's an updated version of Rapunzel. That's the kind of complete rethinking I'm looking at. It's fun, it's new, and it's edgy. I like it. And if they were forced to remake themselves every 10 years, it'd be not only beneficial to end users like myself, but they would have a fresh market to work with every 10 years as well, meaning even more potential sales than they have now.
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AS usual the corporate copyright holders want something for nothing. They want copyright to be treated as perpetual property, but they don't want to pay taxes on it like they do for real property.
Steve, we could quibble over length before taxation, (I prefer 20 years, to match patent) but since everybody is screaming for Federal revenue to close the budget deficit, it's the classic "don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree" tax. Now is the time to write the head of the House Ways and Means committee...