Matthew GarrettProposal: copyright term length based on how much money you end up making off it (with term reducing as profit increases). This will solve precisely zero problems, but will make Hollywood accounting even more hilarious.
matt@mjg59 this is funny, but also attractive. I've often wondered how I might structure something similar if I ever build something people would buy. I'm attracted to the idea of "this thing cost me $10k to build. When I make $20k it's free and libre for all". It'd be nice to have that wrapped up in a Creative Commons -like licence clause complete with a button (and a progress meter?)
@maphew It ends up providing an incentive for spinning the project out into some other entity and then obfuscating what's actually being charged for so I don't think there's any way it could actually work outside tying it to some explicit funding platform
Tursiae@mjg59 Scaling it by aggregate viewing time would be great.
2 million viewer-hours? Looks like the copyright expired on opening weekend!
Shane Celis@mjg59 Three words: Intellectual Property Tax
After a nominal period of protection, say, 20 years the rights holder may continue protection by paying for it based on a percentage of its estimated worth up until a maximum time limit is reached, say, 100 years.
Nicolás Alvarez@mjg59 @shanecelis I don't think it makes sense for software specifically to have copyright protection past 20 years 🙃
@shanecelis This still provides an incentive for highly profitable works to remain under copyright which is sort of the opposite of what I want here
Elena ``of Valhalla''@mjg59 @shanecelis OTOH, being under copyright is less damaging for highly profitable works (for which there are incentives to keep it available to the public) than for less profitable works that are more likely to fall into oblivion.
Daniel S. Reichenbach@shanecelis @mjg59 that actually sounds good. But the percentage should increase ridiculously every year to the point of becoming unreasonable after 25 years to incentivise making new things. Not like Mickey Mouse got any better because of extended copyright…
Tristan Colgate-McFarlane@mjg59 I sense an awful lot of "Research and Development " in your imagined future.
Space Hobo@mjg59 For some reason, this makes me think of the off-licence by my old flat in Hammersmith. They had a pretty wide selection, and not-so-knowledgeable staff, but whoever did inventory knew what was up.
So the shelves in back were covered in bottles with pretty decent prices on, like maybe £3-5 cheaper than you could get in the neighbourhood. So I'd go in and grab a bottle of something, and the bottle behind it would have a sticker showing about what you'd pay elsewhere. The last row of bottles had a markup.
It was a really simple scarcity-based pricing trick that I once implemented in a priority queue system for some kind of build manager.
Grant Gould@mjg59 Copyright extension price an exponential function of duration times the price of a license to the work.
The accounting would still be hilarious, but you'd also make them commit to an actual price, which would be even more hilarious.
The accounting would still be hilarious, but you'd also make them commit to an actual price, which would be even more hilarious.
Mark Pauley@mjg59 copyright term length is related to the rate at which you are making money, and also the instantaneous rate at which your copyright term length is changing.
Julian Andres Klode 🏳️🌈@mjg59 I think it's easier to just bill them 1% of cumulative revenue starting the 11th year for each year they want to extend.
So at year 11 you'll pay 1% of first-10y-revenue, then to extend copyright for year 12 you pay 1% on the first 11 years and so on.
Tweak the numbers but this should work. And it creates government employment opportunities to handle the copyright extension filings and billing.