owners should not be denied legitimate copyright protection for technicali-
ties, no doubt; but assuring that the reach of state-backed monopolies over
speech is not broader than necessary is not a "technicality." If welfare recipi-
ents can be denied their benefits because they fail to complete a benefits
form properly, then I can't see the unfairness in requiring those who de-
mand state support to defend their monopoly similarly by filling out a regis-
tration form.

I would go even further.[14-14]

/tab\/tab\FIVE-YEAR RENEWABLE TERMS/tab\/tab\

Authors and creators deserve to receive the benefits of their creation.
But when those benefits stop, what they create should fall into the public
domain. It does not do so now. Every creative act reduced to a tangible me-
dium is protected for upward of 150 years, whether or not the protection
benefits the author. This work thus falls into a copyright black hole, unfree
for over a century.

The solution to this black hole of copyright is to force those who benefit
from copyright to take steps to protect their state-backed benefit. And in the
age of the Internet, those steps could be extremely simple.

Work that an author "publishes" should be protected for a term of five
years once registered, and that registration can be renewed fifteen times. If
the registration is not renewed, then the work falls into the public domain.

Registration need not be difficult. The U.S. Copyright Office could run
a simple Web site where authors could register their work. That Web site
could be funded by charges for copyright renewals. When an author wants
to renew the copyright, the system could charge the author a renewal fee.
That fee might increase over time or depend upon the nature of the work.

This registration site could also take deposits of certain kinds of work. For
archive purposes, the site could collect digital copies of all the works copy-
righted. And for certain kinds of work -- software in particular -- those de-
posits would be required for the protection to be secured. Given how easy
the Net has made such transfers, these costs would be relatively small.

"Unpublished works" would be different. If I write an e-mail and send it
to a group of my friends, that creativity should be treated differently from
the creativity of a published book or recorded song. The e-mail should be
protected for privacy reasons, the song and book protected as a quid pro quo
for a government-backed monopoly. Thus, for private, unpublished corre-
spondence, I think the current protection is perfectly sensible: the life of the

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v?