I have lately been fond of the idea of not abolishing, copyright, but setting a copyright tax that increases heavily over time. Say, first two years tax-free, third year USD 1000 and doubling after that each year. Once copyright holder fails to pay the tax, the copyrighted work becomes automatically public domain. Orphan works would be solved as well with this.
(Admittably, I have not thought the international problems that this might cause)
> Once copyright holder fails to pay the tax, the copyrighted work becomes automatically public domain
...or it gets bought by some more powerful entity - capable of paying the tax - shortly before this happens. Leading to concentration of copyrights in the hands of big corporations, to an extent even larger than under current system.
> or it gets bought by some more powerful entity - capable of paying the tax
The "doubling after that each year" provision of the original comment neatly takes care of that. After a relatively small number of doublings the size of the tax for the single item would be larger than the current US national debt.
Did you calculate how much tax would be payable after e.g. 20 years? I guess it would be a very rare piece of work that anyone would be willing to pay the tax for longer than 20 years.
They're not. The copyleft portion of the GPL prevents improvements to open source code being locked up. In the case of source code, simply putting it in the public domain is of little use if the source code isn't public.
The revenue generally goes down over time, while copyright tax goes up. At some point the two intersect and that is where it doesn't make economic sense to continue paying for copyright.
How many 20 year old pieces of copyrighted work you know where the copyright holder would be willing to pay 130 Million USD in taxes to keep the copyright one more year? I can't think of a single one.
