> registering minor things just in case something catches on.
On the other hand, should minor things be copyright-able? Like this message I am writing?
If you spent a year writing a book, sure, copyright it. But if you drew a quick doodle on a napkin, scanned it and put it on a t-shirt to impress your friends, is that really worthy?
If you can't be bothered to register a copyright, which just takes a few minutes, it is not worth copyright protection.
I think there's a wide intermediate space there. What if you spent a few hours on something? Maybe on the sort of short story people post to, say, Reddit or Tumblr? That's actually a significant effort, that it would be bad if someone else tried to sell it as their own, but also not so much that you'd naturally think "oh I should register this".
> If you can't be bothered to register a copyright, which just takes a few minutes, it is not worth copyright protection.
Wait, does copyright registration take just a few minutes currently? I hadn't realized. That's good to hear.
Edit: I guess I was implicitly assuming that we'd also be adding a registration fee, which, even if small, makes registration the sort of thing you're not very likely to do for a day-or-two project.
> Having a filter of you have to bother to register and bother playing a small a fee means you get to decide if it is worthwhile or not.
Sure, but my point is that there a number of cases where having to make that decision doesn't really have good results. When you're a professional you can make a point of explicitly copyrighting everything. When you're just some random person posting stuff on the internet because you think it's cool (like, if you write a short story in a Reddit comment), you are not realistically going to bother to copyright it all simply due to the inconvenience (and if you have to pay a fee you're certainly not going to), so I don't think requiring this has good results in this case.
> This system worked quite well before implicit copyright.
I mean, certainly it did, no question there, but I'm wondering if we can do even better by getting the advantages of both. I'm not sure your replies are addressing this point, really. Like, could you give an example of a case where my proposal would seriously fail at the goal of preventing a copyright snarl?
> Like, could you give an example of a case where my proposal would seriously fail at the goal of preventing a copyright snarl?
I'm not quite sure what your proposal is, but implicitly copyrighting something just because someone spent several hours on it isn't an improvement. Everyone who suddenly smells $$$ is going to retroactively claim that.
On the other hand, should minor things be copyright-able? Like this message I am writing?
If you spent a year writing a book, sure, copyright it. But if you drew a quick doodle on a napkin, scanned it and put it on a t-shirt to impress your friends, is that really worthy?
If you can't be bothered to register a copyright, which just takes a few minutes, it is not worth copyright protection.