Depreciation

We seem to live in the age of the infinitely extended copyright term. The date when Disney's beloved Mickey Mouse passes into the public domain is nominally the start of 2024, but it may well turn out to be, as Mary Bono wanted, forever minus one day. That said, the political climate has changed since the last copyright extension, and there is some reason to think this might be it. If the copyright machine, at long last, stops, we'll just have to make do with somewhere around 100 years.

In the face of these gargantuan terms, heavy-handed copyright enforcement, and de-facto elimination of fair use by automated takedowns, it sometimes seems like this whole copyright malarkey is much more trouble than it's worth. Or maybe we should go back to 14-year copyrights, for which there is some theoretical evidence. But it's important to remember that, as with any investment, there is a balance to be struck between rewarding a contribution and providing an indefinite free ride on the basis of some long-past effort.

Actually, the situation reminds me a lot of startups, where there is a very substantial issue with early equity in a company. That equity is meant to be the compensation that founders and early-stage employees receive for their investment in building the company, which then pays out over the life of the company. The only problem is, what happens if one of the founders just leaves? To avoid this problem, equity is given on a vesting schedule, which means that you don't get all of it right away. But even someone whose shares have fully vested can become an unacceptable burden if they leave. A later hire could be contributing far more to the success of the company and get comparatively little.

And beyond startups, this seems like the general thesis of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Centry: that when the value of having things is greater than the value of making things, you have created a dangerous and unstable situation. You need people to keep making things for your economy to work, but they're unlikely to want to do that if they see other people being rewarded highly for resting on their (or their ancestors') laurels.

Piketty's solution is a global wealth tax. That is, to artificially add depreciation to capital. Every year your existing wealth would proportionally reduce itself, with the result that creating new wealth becomes proportionally more valuable. There is a similar solution to the startup problem. Equity is diluted over time as new investors come in, making the existing shares a lower proportion of the (usually more valuable) pie. It's not unheard of for companies to issue new shares non-proportionally to specifically dilute one founder. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, did this at Facebook (and, in fairness, got sued for it).

I feel like there is a similar solution waiting out there for copyright. It is true that we should reward people for making things, and, inevitably, that will turn into a reward for having made something in the past. But for how long? And, more importantly, why is it a function with a single step from 100% to 0%? Surely Disney's creation in 1928 can't be worth the same in 2023, and then nothing in 2024.

What would an artificial deprecation schedule for copyrightk look like? Maybe the bar for acceptable fair use could lower throughout the life of the work. Or perhaps something like compulsory licensing with a rate that decreases over time. Another interesting alternative I've read is to make holding the copyright beyond some nominal term (14 years, perhaps?) cost increasingly large maintenance fees.

I'm not saying this would remove the need for other kinds of copyright reform, but it would certainly seem fairer if I had a stronger claim to something I made today than Disney has to something made almost ninety years ago by a man who died fifty years ago. Especially when all that old creative wealth, if unlocked, could provide the raw materials for a new generation of creators who are otherwise on their own.