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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Do you have a perpetual right to something you lease? That is the correct analogy. Because the law grants you a lease on all the rights to exploit a particular copyright.
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Not really. The government provides you with protection over something you created.
If you write a book, the government does not sieze ownership and then give you back rights. Rather, when you put something into a fixed form, they protect your work for a finite duration. When that protection expires, your work goes into public domain.
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Originally Posted by RSE
Copyright holders are lucky. They don't have to pay a percentage of their gross to the government for the right to have their lease.
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Actually, they do. It's called "taxes."
Governments can charge additional fees afaik, but Berne specifies that as soon as content is in a "fixed form," it is considered protected by copyright. You do not need to fill out any forms or pay any fees. This is actually highly beneficial to content creators, especially small scale artists like photographers.