Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
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.
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Interesting hypotheticals, and I think it comes down to what you want copyright to accomplish. I see the goals of copyright (in my mind) as two-fold:
1. Encourage creativity by protecting the rights of the content creator for a reasonable time. In order to invest significant time into a creative effort, I want to know that if my book sells well, that I won't suddenly have five competitors selling copies of my book that I don't get paid for. And if it gets turned into a movie, it is done after paying me for the right to use my creative effort.
2. Encourage creativity by releasing the book into the public domain after a suitable period. Then we can have new efforts building on existing works: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or a special illustrated version with hundreds of pictures.
Both of these can be satisfied, even with much shorter copyright terms. And having a renewal term and charging more than a nominal fee for it enhances #2, while still allowing financial gain in #1 for works that continue to be profitable for the creator.
In the case of your photography example, do you expect to earn more than $4M from the photos you took 20 years ago? If so, by all means, renew your copyright. If not, renew the handful that are worth the fee, and go out and take some new photos that will be protected for the next 20 years.
If you want to enforce no commercial uses of your work, then you decide whether that is worth $2000 to you. Again, part of the tit-for-tat of copyright is that in return for exclusive rights for a limited time, you give up your exclusive rights when the copyright expires. And that is something that creators will know up front.
For the 100 books a year author, it probably isn't worth it to him financially to renew. And that's not necessarily bad. If he is depending on on-going revenue for more than 20 years, then he will know up front that he had better write more than one book in his lifetime, just like patent-holders know that they won't be able to continue to profit from licensing agreements when their patents expire. If he thinks his book could be made into a giant movie, then gamble and renew the copyright. Or let it expire and let the movie be a giant advertisement for his other books.
I agree, it wouldn't the same world as we live in with Life+70 copyrights, or whatever, and it may force some hard decisions, but it certainly isn't unworkable or automatically unfair.