Further, the tax is not small at all. Any author produces a vast amount of works, even though the author may not be commercially succesful. Only to keep the copyright to my personal home page my children (should I have any) would have to pay some USD 10,000 according to Lessig's suggestion. Still, they may want to maintain my copyright for other reasons than commercial ones.

I have a hard time understanding why you or your children whould even want to keep a copyright on your current web page(s) 50 years hence. How many people have some work of their parents or grandparents that is over 50 years old and they wish they still had a copyright on it or are making use of a still existing copyright? And for those that are making use of the copyright, would $50 (per work) really prevent you from doing so?

Such suggestion would only - as any copyright registration requirements - punish the poor.

If the Supreme Court had overturned the retroactive aspects of the 1976 and 1998 acts, then most works old works that were older than about 50-70 years would have been put in the public domain. Punishing the rich and poor alike.

Up until 1976 registration was always required. The value of having registration would be much greater now than it was in 1975, because it could be cheaply searched at any library if not the whole internet.

In the proposed compromise there is still no initial registration required. A fee would be useful to pay for the registration system itself. To be less discriminatory the registation fee could be on a sliding scale.

The public domain benefits the poor more than the rich since the rich could always buy the material they want. If 90% of the old matrial is not registered and it enter the public domain then this benefits the poor.

Granting the effectively infinite monopoly to the descendants or successor coporations without a system to locate the holder is ridiculous. It means only the rich can afford to discover the holder, and the poor can only assume that the copyright is still valid. No registration punishes the poor.

Only to keep the copyright to my personal home page my children (should I have any) would have to pay some USD 10,000 according to Lessig's suggestion.

Your $ 10,000 would be 200 x $50 which would be enough to keep you website in copyright for a total of 250 years. Is this what you mean? Perhaps there is too much confusion about what a "work" would be on the world wide web. Since the purpose is not to generate revenue, I would make the definition of such a "work" more inclusive.

Any author produces a vast amount of works, even though the author may not be commercially succesful.

One could imagine a volume discount on registation for individuals (not corporations). The purpose of registration is not to generate revenue, it is:

to make the copyright holder claim the work is valuable

to cause works the holder has forgotten to or declined to register to fall into the public domain

to make possible to easily and cheaply learn if the work is registered and to locate the holder

The result is that even a teenager could quickly check the public domain status of something before adding it to their homepage. And if it is registered you might be able to locate and email the holder.

Lessig and many other U.S. scholars misses the point of authorship and moral rights - which is perhaps the most fundamental reason for introducing copyright protection at all, deriving from the ideas developed during the French revolution.

Ah...the other point of view. I googled a page that seems to discuss this misunderstanding:

http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/infosoc/98_1hol d/1.h tm

I know too little about the effect of "moral rights" to debate them.

• the right of integrity
• the right of attribution

If you had a choice of doubling your salary (by taking a higher-paying job) or halving your living expenses (by moving to a smaller town), all other things being equal, which would you choose?

It seems to be that the latter option is the more sane one because there's no guarantee that you're going to stay for long at higher-paying job. Same thing with long copyright periods: there's no guarantee that you're going to make much money off it anyway, but if you can borrow tried-and-true works from the past, your chances can increase.

Lessig and many other U.S. scholars misses the point of authorship and moral rights - which is perhaps the most fundamental reason for introducing copyright protection at all, deriving from the ideas developed during the French revolution.

This is America, not France. If you would be happier in France, be my guest.

The American attitude about copyright from the time of the framers straight through much of the twentieth century was that there are no "author's rights"; that copyright was a social bargain - you give us this, and we'll give you that.

Thomas Jefferson once said very plainly, "[P]atents are not a matter of property." That is the traditional American attitude about copyrights and patents.

I think that copyright periods and powers should be reduced all around. I don't agree with the "intellectual property" arguements, but I think if we had well-constituted copyright law that those arguments would be legally meaningless (that is, no one would have to agree with one side or the other about the issue to see that the law was good).

The biggest problem with copyright right now, I think, is that those who purchase software/books/music/movies/etc. don't have the same rights that those who purchase material objects do. Traditionally, buyers could only have restrictions placed on how they use what they buy if they agree to it before they buy the thing. With copyright, buyers have to assume that they have no rights over what they purchase unless the "owner" says they do.

I think that for art and literature made by indviduals, a lifetime copyright (provide that not too many powers are granted) would not be a disaster. As for work-for-hire, I don't have much sympathy for corporations; I think that 25 years is more than enough time.

I think I explained this in my first post, but I think that corporations should accept short copyright terms because once their cost of development is paid, they are on no worse ground than anyone else. I say let the free market take over after a reasonable amount of time.

For individuals, of course, this is different. An individual author is not likely to be able to afford to run his own publishing company, except for e-books. So protecting them from these problems for their life might be a good idea.

Here's what I think: If authors have too few copyright powers, and you get anarchy, sure. But if they have too many, and you get feudalism. Unfortunately, we are a feudal technocracy right now.