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I have recently been thinking that copyright and patents should be enforced until the creator made back their money plus a set profit; like 30%. The reason for this is that it makes it similar to physical products which are often sold at cost plus some profit; usually around 20-50% depending on competition.

Doing it this way has some interesting side effects.

• It puts creative production on par with physical production.
• It requires transparent accounting.
• It covers the hard work required to develop something while not giving windfall profits to minor discoveries that just piggyback off the work of others.
• The more that is charged for a protected product, the quicker it enters the public domain. If you needed to keep a copyright for a long time then you wouldn’t charge a lot for it which is still beneficial to the public.

There could be some nuances. I’d imagine that there would be some threshold amount that covers smaller items. Maybe everything is covered for the first $200,000 or so. If one was claiming more than that for R&D then they would have to produce accounting demonstrating that amount. That way smaller creators aren’t necessarily burdened like a large corporation that does R&D for a living would be.

Obviously numbers could be fudged, but it could be set up so that is difficult. Accounting could be adjusted. Perhaps quarterly or yearly reports have to be made on which projects money was spent on. That way there would be a paper trail that would make it harder to pretend like more work was done on something than actually was.

Just a thought.