[P A T H E T I C]. Literally EVERYTHING wring with gaming today.
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We had this discussion in the 2000s: let copyright expire.
The precise reason for this dumpster fire was Disney's success at essentially securing "IP"s in perpetuity. Nothing less than 100 years old is released to the general public, making IP valuable.
Because they are valuable, companies feel the need to use them. Disney still haven't made back what they paid for Star Wars, so they have no choice but to set the sludge pump to maximum.
25 years is plenty of time to milk a franchise, but I always pushed a different idea.
The government creates a third party office of copyright registration, self-funded. Their job is simply to record who created what and keep a copy of what was made. This vastly simplifies lawsuits to the point that they could almost be automated.
The cost to register is $1. The anual cost to renew, however, doubles every year.
This results in the costs for the first ten or so years being negligible; if the work makes any money, the cost is not onerous.
After that, however, IP holders need to think hard about whether it's worth paying thousands or millions to keep it.
This doesn't stop things like Disney Star Wars, but it does allow people to see what good Star Wars looks like and makes it pointless to hinge your entire strategy on collecting IPs, rather than, say, good writing or casting.
Retarded. They would still be valuable even without individual companies having a monopoly on them, and in the specific example of Star Wars they have never set the sludge pipe to maximum, they got scared off of that idea before they even had the chance to try it thanks to how badly the sequel trilogy bombed. The initial plan was yearly movie releases presumably with the hope of going the marvel direction and increasing that output to at least one movie per quarter but after TROS it's taken them over a decade to get the balls to put another release in theatres where the numbers are metrics of success are more well known and publicly known.
With registration costs that low you're basically encouraging patent trolling, and the compounding costs would hit failed indies the hardest. lets say you're only on year ten after release of an e-book or a game or something, unless you're already established and successful then the costs of keeping ownership of that IP will already cost more than it's worth.
Now lets look at this from the consumer perspective, Would you pay even $15 for something that you know will be free in just a couple years? Unless you expect to die before then I imagine not unless it's something that you are really eager to experience. It would create a mentality among people that everything created by a common man is free while only products made by multibillion dollar corporations need to be paid for because their IPs are worth enough to keep paying for the holding costs for 30 years without it being even amounting to 1% of original production cost so they will be able to hold onto their IP for ungodly long periods of time.
Alternative theory. Eliminate the unmitigated bullshit that is IP law as a concept to being with, and go to a legal system that actually makes sense