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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
If your work isn't worth $2,000 for 20-40 years of exclusivity, it doesn't need to be renewed....
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So, if an author publishes 10 short stories in a year, and they remain popular more than 20 years later, she has to shell out $20,000 and hope the Copyright Office doesn't screw up the renewal in order to protect her revenues?
What about photographers? Even back in the days of film, a photographer could easily submit 2,000 images per year to a stock agency. Those images can easily hold commercial value for 30 years. After year 20, should she be required to pay $4 million
every year to protect her intellectual property? (And yes, photos can still produce revenues after 20 years.)
What if I want to use copyright laws to enforce free distribution, but bar any and all commercial uses? I can't rely on public domain to do that, since with PD anyone is allowed to use the work for anything, including commercial uses. Do I now need to plunk down $2000 to prevent other people from making money off of my work?
Let's say I'm an author. I publish a book on Smashwords; I price it at $1 per copy and it earns me $100 a year, all the way out to year 20. At that point, should I invest every penny I earned on that book into a registration fee? And how should I feel, if I choose not to renew the copyright, and some Hollywood studio takes the book, doctors it up and makes a huge movie out of it? I've lost my copyrights, so I've lost out on any possible royalties or revenues.
Yet again, automatic copyright protects the "little guy" -- the independent artists who are cranking out a ton of the work. Orphaned works are not such a huge problem that fixing this requires violating the Berne Convention and placing onerous and expensive burdens on artists, or rolling back the clock to one of the worst aspects of previous copyright incarnations.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
If it doesn't involve shortening copyright, we're going to have a growing digital split between corporate copyright interests and individual non-commercial use.
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Not really.
If an artist wants to release or tolerate non-commercial uses of their IP, absolutely nothing about copyright stops that -- in fact, copyright facilitates it.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Copyright infringement penalties are absolutely ridiculous when applied to individuals, and most people who look at the cases agree--there's no way that uploading a couple-dozen songs is a couple-million dollars worth of damage to anyone.
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Except the juries that repeatedly nailed a certain infringer with huge fines.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Several clubs have now declared that "open mic night" can only allow original songs because of copyright hassles. This is... not helping anyone.
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It helps the composers who write the songs, since about 90% of the ASCAP/BMI fees are paid out as royalties. And yes, making sure an artist gets paid royalties, if the artist chooses to collect such payments, is one major purpose of copyright.
In this case, the clubs don't want to pay ASCAP and BMI fees. From what I can tell, they charge the establishment $35 each for the licenses of a live music performance, but $0 if they have permission (e.g. a band plays original material). So if they have a cover band -- or a band that plays one cover -- they lose an extra $70 for the night. These agencies have annual caps on the fees as well, by the way.
The costs are not always trivial, but that's just a part of doing business. The fact that the club isn't happy about ASCAP/BMI fees does not give them a moral justification to get what they want for free.