Sales-based copyright?
I was thinking about copyright, and how every time it's mentioned on the usual sites there's a score of people who have their own ideas on how to reform it. X years for this, Y years for that, payment-based, time-based, something-else-based.
Well, how about this: sales-based, max 20 years.
Start with a maximum copyright length. Twenty years is probably enough. If you create a work and haven't done anything with it in twenty years, it's time to let someone else have a crack at it.
Then, for every sale, decrement the maximum remaining length. Not by much, though - selling a thousand or a hundred thousand items shouldn't have much effect. But how about a year for each 1% of humanity? So if you crack sixty million book sales, movie tickets, DVDs, CDs, adaptations, whatever, of your work, you only get 19 years of copyright. Break 120 million sales and you get 18 years.
Basically, in order to completely blow your copyright away, you'd have to sell twelve hundred million copies, items or tickets in your first week. And if you can manage that, you've pretty much made it and can stop squawking about your baby now being in public hands.
Of course, the eternal-copyright mob (read: Disney and any descendents of bestselling artists etc) would be horrified. Not only would *everything* made prior to 1987 be in the public domain, but so would many mega-popular characters who had debuted since then and enjoyed massive success.
Think about it. Everything from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and most of the 80s. Lord of the Rings. Star Trek. Star Wars. The Beatles. Most original rock'n'roll and practically everything from the glam rock era. If you were a child of the 80s, pretty much everything you grew up watching or buying. My Little Pony. GI Joe (which has been around for more decades than that). Transformers. All the 60s and 70s TV shows. Michael Jackson's early hits. Scooby Doo.
Would you want a world where Batman and Superman were public domain? Where anyone could make Star Trek videos or merchandise? Where you were allowed to sing 'Happy Birthday' or 'Imagine' in public without owing a fee to some faceless corporation? Where an artist's kids, grandkids and great-grandkids couldn't lounge around on free royalties their whole life simply because great-grandma once wrote a bestseller or smash hit fifty years before they were born?
Not to mention a world where ultra-popular works might hit the public domain in under ten years (600 million sales) or even five years (900 million sales). And that would have to be pretty damn popular. The movie with the most tickets sold, total, EVER, is "Gone with the Wind", with about 200 million of the little suckers. It'd still have 83% of its original copyright period intact. "Return of the King" fell short of 6 million tickets, which would allow it to retain at least 97.5% of its original copyright length before DVD sales. The characters and Middle-Earth itself, of course, would be public domain.
Well, how about this: sales-based, max 20 years.
Start with a maximum copyright length. Twenty years is probably enough. If you create a work and haven't done anything with it in twenty years, it's time to let someone else have a crack at it.
Then, for every sale, decrement the maximum remaining length. Not by much, though - selling a thousand or a hundred thousand items shouldn't have much effect. But how about a year for each 1% of humanity? So if you crack sixty million book sales, movie tickets, DVDs, CDs, adaptations, whatever, of your work, you only get 19 years of copyright. Break 120 million sales and you get 18 years.
Basically, in order to completely blow your copyright away, you'd have to sell twelve hundred million copies, items or tickets in your first week. And if you can manage that, you've pretty much made it and can stop squawking about your baby now being in public hands.
Of course, the eternal-copyright mob (read: Disney and any descendents of bestselling artists etc) would be horrified. Not only would *everything* made prior to 1987 be in the public domain, but so would many mega-popular characters who had debuted since then and enjoyed massive success.
Think about it. Everything from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and most of the 80s. Lord of the Rings. Star Trek. Star Wars. The Beatles. Most original rock'n'roll and practically everything from the glam rock era. If you were a child of the 80s, pretty much everything you grew up watching or buying. My Little Pony. GI Joe (which has been around for more decades than that). Transformers. All the 60s and 70s TV shows. Michael Jackson's early hits. Scooby Doo.
Would you want a world where Batman and Superman were public domain? Where anyone could make Star Trek videos or merchandise? Where you were allowed to sing 'Happy Birthday' or 'Imagine' in public without owing a fee to some faceless corporation? Where an artist's kids, grandkids and great-grandkids couldn't lounge around on free royalties their whole life simply because great-grandma once wrote a bestseller or smash hit fifty years before they were born?
Not to mention a world where ultra-popular works might hit the public domain in under ten years (600 million sales) or even five years (900 million sales). And that would have to be pretty damn popular. The movie with the most tickets sold, total, EVER, is "Gone with the Wind", with about 200 million of the little suckers. It'd still have 83% of its original copyright period intact. "Return of the King" fell short of 6 million tickets, which would allow it to retain at least 97.5% of its original copyright length before DVD sales. The characters and Middle-Earth itself, of course, would be public domain.