Copyright woes

Being an internet-enabled tech geek, I see the discussion of copyright come up at least once every couple of months. The "discussion" tends to fall into two camps: either copyright is necessary for creators to make money, or copyright is an abusive, horrible mangling of law that allows the Man to oppress us all.

Only problem is that both sides are right.

If we abolished copyright entirely, all that would happen is that the small companies (where most of the innovation occurs) would go out of business as the corporations hire people to look for new releases, change a few names (assuming trademarks still exist), and distribute as their own product. If you thought the market was full of the same crap now, imagine a situation where the latest hit becomes literally copied by every player in the industry.

On the other hand, decreasing costs and increased ability to self-publish argue for a DECREASE in copyright length, yet the opposite has happened. We're at the ludicrous point where copyright lasts longer than the creator does, yet the Supreme Court decided that this wasn't a violation of "limited time" in the Constitution. Software points out just how bad the system has become. Every piece of code EVER WRITTEN is still under copyright, no matter that the machines the code runs on haven't existed in decades.

What we need is a drastic scaling back of copyright. For starters, remove the automatic copyright provision. If you want a copyright, you should register with the Library of Congress and keep your contact information up to date. Given the prevalence of computers and internet access, this should be trivial, but it's an important filter. Registering would give you ten years of copyright protection, with the option to renew for another ten. After that, you're at the mercy of the market...and quite frankly, what music, movie, book, or game have you bought that's more than 20 years old and still covered under copyright?

Sounds like a simple solution, but good luck getting it passed as a law. The ones who benefit directly from this are the small companies, and how much clout do they have with Congress?