Good points. Normally, your discarded drafts are just written off as the cost of creating the keeper. It's not worth anyone's time to put them all out for bid.

However, for a really big project, there's a "salvage value" or "scrap value." It's not zero.

You can't have your cake and eat it. If you want to use copyright protection, you should only be able to do so after making your work public.

If you then destroy your original work or refuse to let other people use it on reasonable terms, you can't sue people for copyright infringement when they use it.

> Would same logic also apply to a patents of a company that creates 10 different prototype engine designs, and decides to only bring one of them to market?

I think you shouldn't be able to use patent protection unless you also make your design available on the market for a reasonable fee.

Do those 10 engines have ten different patents? Then definitely take away 9 of those patents if they won't use them or FRAND license them.

If all the prototypes were for the same patent, there's no issue.

For the draft comics, I think you could pretty well argue those are part of the same work. And I'd be okay excluding projects under a certain size from the rule.