We could get back to that world with anti-trust enforcement and mandatory licensing, while still keeping whatever positive effects competition has had on content production (which I think are debatable at best: it seems like no one outside of low-budget stuff like Dropout is making anything interesting in the US right now.)
I think a great copyright compromise to the insanely long copyright periods would be if certain types of content had standardized licensing costs that kicked in after a certain amount of time.
It would be a very interesting concept if after 10/20 years, anyone could grab any copyrighted content and redistribute it as long as they paid the copyright owner a license fee determined by copyright law.
So should Disney be forced to license Avengers at the same price I license my cat videos? Should every content creator be forced to license everything? Why stop at video? What about books? Software?
Maybe the answer is yes, after a certain amount of time has passed.
It would be a great compromise to our insane copyright periods that currently exist if you ask me.
The industry can keep it insanely long copyright lengths but maybe after 20 years the whole world should be free to distribute Seinfeld and Friends and just pay a standard royalty rate so that content rights holders don’t become consolidated empires that are too big to compete against realistically, becoming inevitable monopoly players.
Wolverine and Deadpool cost $430 million to make. My hypothetical cat video was free to make. How is it fair that Disney has to license their movie for the same as mine?
