There is little doubt in modern western society that copyright is an important asset in both protecting content and making it more profitable to produce and distribute, benefiting everyone. This said, there’s a debate that copyright law has been pushed too far, trivializing the public domain at the cost of the public. This sort of rhetoric and debate calls into question how we manage the public domain, and what we should do about it.
So what does our current copyright law look like? Well it lasts for about 50 years after the authors dies, or 75 years for corporate authorship, which is when an item is made by a team of people on salary. What this means is that generally if you watch a movie as a kid, that movie likely won’t transfer into the public domain for the rest of your life, however your kids will likely see it move to the public domain towards the end of theirs. There is a little more complexity to this law as well, as we also have fair use in the US, which grants people the right to reuse works in short bits for the purpose of humor. Lastly copyright law also applies to other creations such as computer code, where people aren’t allowed to copy computer code and use it themselves until around 75 years after it’s been written, by which point in time it has likely been made obsolete.
But the real question we have to ask ourselves is, is this bad? Objectively copyright should be used to promote the creation of work, both in the form of new work and rewrites of old work. Additionally the best way to promote this sort of creativity is to make it more profitable; the more money you can make off your work, the more money you have to reinvest and produce even more.
Keeping this in mind, when designing a new set of copyright laws we should try to focus on prolongating length of copyright law on works that have already been created, while shortening the length of protection on less relevant works that have faded out of use, allowing other people to take them and rework them, to possibly make it better. When doing this, we additionally want to keep in mind the life span of people, and their ability to remember older publications. Lastly, we want to attempt to keep the law as simple as possible while respecting the living authors desire not to see his work ‘bastardized’ through inevitable, possibly crude, fan fiction or rewrites.
Considerations such as those above have lead me to create what I consider to be a strong candidate for a replacement to the current US copyright law. I suggest we reduce the absolute limit for copyright so that the work will be protected under copyright for the better part of a persons life, and if the work is still in use and its publishers want to continue using it, they can pay to register it for an extended duration of time to reach the full copyright protections. This means companies like Disney can continue building out franchises like StarWars and the MCU, while works that go out of production and are no longer being worked on will fall under public domain in time for people who remember them to be able to create new content with it while it’s still extant. The fee to reregister will have to cover the cost to keep the registry, and should either adjust with inflation automatically or be adjusted by the organization that maintains it (likely the FCC). We also should ensure the fee isn’t trivial, as a 20 dollar fee would defeat the purpose of the work. I’d imagine a fee more on the order of one to ten thousand dollars would be negligible for a work still in production (such as the star wars universe), however would be a waste of money for a book that’s no longer in print or a movie you can no longer license with a distributor. Below is a table of the time frames I believe would work well.
| Corporate Ownership | Individual Ownership | |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute Limit | 55 | Life + 20 |
| Extended Limit | 75 | Life + 50 |
The extended time limits were chosen to continue precedent, while the absolute limits were chosen as approximations of the time a creative person might spend in the work force, allowing for them to pass down these stories to their immediate successors who could then potentially use them in their own content.
I think the question on changes to copyright is a complex one; not because we don’t know how to produce certain results but because we don’t know what results we really want to produce. It really doesn’t seem fair that Disney might lose their copyright protection on early StarWars movies, meanwhile they shouldn’t hold a monopoly on certain ideas forever, leading to situations like the “Happy Birthday song” lawsuits. I believe, however, that there is a brighter future in simple modular copyright laws, which is why I think a change to our copyright code similar to this one would be a good path to take.