It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).
Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.
There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Friday April 24 2015, @04:41PM
Exactly. I proposed this exact scheme (with slightly different years and dollar amounts) years ago on that other site.
My idea was basically 5 years copyright for free, and then you had to renew it every 5 years. Every time you renew, it costs 10x as much money; maybe $10k for 10 years, $100k for 15 years, $1M for 20 years, etc. If your copyrighted work is really that valuable, you should be able to afford these fees. If it isn't valuable and profitable enough to afford that, then it should just be in the public domain. 5 years for free is good enough so that small/poor artists and creators aren't burdened in any way and have a chance at making big money, and for highly profitable works, they can keep it protected for a long time, and the money will help fund the government.