I'll blow your mind and tell you that it largely already works this way and it's the worst thing ever. Not governments, collecting societies and performance rights organizations are responsible for making sure that artists get paid for public use and distribution of their works - but (probably depending on the country) they only do so for their paying members (or members of other such organizations) plus memberships usually impose insane restrictions. These memberships are voluntary but becoming less and less attractive and organizations like the German GEMA are infamous for harming both the audiences as well as the artists (for instance by denying German users access to YouTube uploads even of German bands - which specifically upload their German songs for their almost exclusively German audiences!). So examples for a model like this already exist and already it's awful for many people on both sides, the audience's and the artists'.

I think copyright should last as long creator lives or maybe his life +10 years for various reasons.

Not life +70/90/or how much is required to prevent mickey mouse to fall in free domain.

Agreed. Things aren't *that* wrong as they are. The real problem are absurd expiration dates and the issues where it's impossible to reach a rightsholder or intellectual gets stuck in legal limbo, I think there should be certain exceptions for the latter two cases.

Given that the game's engine is named after Lovecraft, it wouldn't surprise me if the gameplay wasn't "inspired" by Lovecraft as well.

That was kind of the point as only a percentile based pricing could give an "eternal" protection to all authors while being required to pay any fixed annual amount of money per published work would eventually become too much for all but the big publishers. By protecting all works for a limited time and then requiring them to become public domain, the burden of enforcing copyright for the authors can be justified to be payed by the society.

As for how long that protection should last, that is up to debate, but the idea of a lifetime + x years seems rather arbitrary as any accident, drug overdose or a crazy fan with a gun can remove the first part of that equation. On the other hand by only providing protection for x years, x being less than a lifetime, per published work could be argued to be an incentive for an author to not stop creating new works as soon as one of them becomes popular enough to afford buying a mansion or two.

We should also remember that some creative professions and fields may need longer protection period than others. But generally the more people getting involved in creating something the more likely it is that the rights for it become so tangled up that it's almost impossible to legally print new copies of that work. Why not make it so that games, movies and other collaborative works have a shorter period of protection than more individually done works?

I have to ask you, what exactly is in your opinion wrong with the current situation? What is your beef with copyright as it is now? Because looking at your suggestions I'm under the impression that you're losing focus of what the problems are you wish to address, what the desired situation should be (and I don't mean what model should be in place to enforce that situation but just the overall situation you wish to see) and I think that you are not really aware of the actual effects your model would have. As I said, ideas similar to yours are already largely in place due to performance rights organizations and collecting societies which are largely harmful to both artists (not only their members, even artists who don't want to have anything to do with them) and audiences, in fact they are only beneficial to a small elite and you'd actually want to legally enforce that kind of thing while already now the problem is that at least in some countries these organizations have far too much power.

What I see is this: you desire a model where people actually have to pay money and perform additional steps via visits to public offices for rights which are currently considered absolutely basic legal rights of everyone, be it a huge company with an army of lawyers or a little child composing piano pieces to impress its parents - that sole fact already offends me and I'm wondering whether you are willing to actually take a basic right away from almost everyone in the world or whether you just didn't think of how much harm your model could do.

Additionally your model also fails in all the technical aspects. For instance: What would be the point in time when rights are first applied to intellectual property and that is used to determine how long they are going to last? Death of an author is a pretty indisputable and precise point but any other one simply cannot be defined in a consistent logical manner. Would it be the date when a work has been finished? Would it be the date when someone has begun working on something? Would it be the date when a work was first published, commercially or to the public domain? Or would one actually have to first register his or her work at a public office before *any* rights apply?

And how do you put a price tag on cultural goods? That's friggin' important in your model and impossible to solve in a consistent, logical and just manner. There's some *standards* in the different industries but nobody dares to legally define the absolute worth of intellectual property because it's just not possible.

How is that even a problem? So an individual was successful and now doesn't *have* to work anymore. If that thought is actually offensive to you then copyright is the least of your concerns since it applies in many other areas as well (and personally I don't consider it a serious issue that needs to be addressed directly). Also I think it's actually okay if successful artists have the ability to sit back and enjoy their success since that may be beneficial to other artists who have yet to be discovered or achieve success.

And here everything falls apart. Suddenly you need hundreds or thousands of exceptions to adjust your model to all the different kinds of intellectual property and professions and based on interpretations and stuff which many artists and regular citizens will consider unfair or otherwise unjustified and the whole system would fail and have to be adjusted whenever there would be unexpected phenomena like new music genres which don't quite qualify as music - issues of that kind actually *have already* lead to a lot of criticism concerning the practices of different collecting societies and performance right organizations which for instance favor classical music over everything else and fail to even recognize certain works as music. And that's only a genre within a certain kind of intellectual property, not even a new kind of creative work altogether.

Rights to a collaborative effort are usually concentrated in one legal entity and most of the time these things work out just fine, it would be absurd to take rights away from everyone due to the legal clusterfucks resulting from the incompetence of a tiny minority.

For instance: the fact that the recent HD re-releases of Silent Hill 2 and 3 could not include the original voice acting was the result of Konami failing to sign any contracts with the actors in the first place, something that basically everyone would have done, even an inexperienced indie developer - and if that had been done there would have been no problems with the re-release. Ultimately they signed contracts with the whole original cast of Silent Hill 2 and could include the original voice acting after all. Now, that could not be done with Silent Hill 3 because one of the original voice actors passed away a while ago - yeah, that sucks and it would be great if there was some way to re-release the game with his performance but heck, cases like these are like one in a zillion and would not have occurred if someone hadn't done an absolutely amateurish mistake. Should really every individual and every organization get their rights limited now because there's a few incompetent people in the world? I don't think so.

And the same goes for the oh so unsolvable legal issues with licensed works. More often than not situations where an old work based on a license cannot be re-released could be solved if someone went the extra mile of signing a new contract or could have been avoided if the initial arrangement had looked differently. No reason to punish all creative people by limiting their rights, though.

No, what I was trying to say was that any other model than having the protection of intellectual works provided for a limited time at the society's expense will not be sustainable for the public or even remotely fair to all authors as with any fixed annual pricing the protection would only last "forever" for the select few who are popular enough to afford it and the percentile based pricing would eventually lead to a situation where eventually as the income goes to zero the rights holder can keep on refusing to release his intellectual work to public domain while the public is still required to pay for the investigation, prosecution and all that stuff if some individual makes an illegal copy of that work.

If we have no expiration date for copyright, this expense will increase cumulatively as time goes on and more and more intellectual works are created. While the death of an author might seem like a reasonable limit, that would only release "indie" works to public domain. As you said, any competent publisher has secured all rights for it's IPs and while publishers can go bankrupt, they never "die" in a sense that their IPs would ever expire.

The right for a copyright starts from the beginning of creating the work and the timer for releasing it to public domain starts to count down when it is officially published?

As I said, my "model" was only meant to point out the flaws of trying to apply any value to immaterial things. They can be priceless and worthless depending who you ask and for the Greater Good they all should become public domain much sooner than current copyright period is thanks to the Mickey Mouse laws.

One way to look at it is to think the copyright as a contract between the author and the society where the protection period is meant to allow the author to dedicate himself fully for creating new works to the society's benefit. The author can of course use that time to learn a new profession or just decide to retire if his latest work has made him rich enough. Either way once he has stopped providing new ideas to the society and his final intellectual work has expired he needs to either live by his savings or pension if doesn't like to seek for another job.

I never said that fixing copyright would be easy, just that with the current model it either takes too long to expire or not it never happens at all as the publishers are practically immora... ...immortal entities that hoard all IPs to themselves forever.

But if we just lump all creative form under the same copyright period it is going to be either too long for most movies and games that sell most of their units in a matter of weeks or too short for a freelance photographer who relies on a huge portfolio that has taken him years to gather up.

At least by fixing the copyright laws now would prevent any future works from getting to a legal limbo. Just by requiring that all rights for a collaborative effort are either bought upfront or if paid by percentile based royalties, paying them will stop when the end product becomes public domain. The individual authors can then be allowed to sell copies of their part of the concept art, music and writings for a x number of years before them too becoming public domain.

Apparently the reason we have not seen many racing sims released on GOG is that most of these games use real life car brands and the contracts for using them have a time limit for how long the games can be sold or how the games can be distributed. This could be seen as an intentional sabotage that is meant to limit how long the end product is available to the public, so why should games like these become public domain immediately after new copies can't be legally sold?

Yes, I know perfectly well that the car brands and sports teams would not allow to use their names for games without these kind of conditions, but that's just another reason to fix the copyright laws so that a sports game can't be made with any limitation for it's selling period other than the moment it becomes public domain. The brands either agree to let the developer use their names or the developers will just use imaginary names and models.