So instead of fixing the problem, we should all throw out the baby with the bathwater, eliminating patents all together, and condemning the many companies who have legitimate reasons and needs for patents.
Our experience with patents in the specific case of software is that they actually hinder progress.
That's one hell of a burden of proof to put on yourself. I don't believe you can POSSIBLY prove that to be the case in any objective way, so the only thing you can argue is a few anecdotes, and what your personal opinion happens to be... Not at all a convincing case.
you have to agree that getting rid of software patents would benefit everyone, globally in the software industry.
No, actually you have to disagree.
Everyone wants to abolish software patents, so they can use the research that went into them without paying, but NOBODY wants to propose ANY alternatives for financial compensation to those who develop such technology. I guess it's going to be up to the magical fairies to develop MPEG-5, 802.11z, et al. for us.
Eliminating software patents will quickly give a boost to free and open source software, and shortly thereafter thrust us all into a dystopian future, where there are NO open standards, very little technological development, and endless new incompatible and proprietary video/audio codecs, wired/wireless communications methods, internet protocols, and hardware designs.
I can't wait for it to happen in the states as I predict it will also trigger the fall in the few countries that also allow software patents.
Indeed it will. When the last large country follow's Europe's lead and jumps at the prisoner's dilemma (of patents) for their own benefit, the remaining few will not possibly be enough to prop up the system.
I'm tired of your feigned idiocy. This will be my final response.
Because of patents it's hard to create a "high quality video codec".
No. Because of patents, it's EASY to create a high quality video codec.
The flip side of that wonderful advantage is that you have to pay licensing fees to the developers of the technology.
Without infringing on patents a quality codec is difficult,
A "quality codec is difficult". End of story. Copying someone else, who has done the hard work, is easy. YOU just want to be able to do so without compensating them for their work that has helped you out so very much.
All the knowledge about HOW to make a good quality codec was developed by corporations, with a profit motive in mind. Obviously, if you abolish software patents, then we all get "free money" so to speak for a very short time, but at that point, we all get stuck where we are, as nobody will spend any money to advance the technology further.
And who wants to create a lossy odec, other than maybe MS and other proprietary venders?
Who wouldn't want to create a lossy codec?
So, Linux, OS X, and most of the software that runs the net isn't ground breaking?
Linux is simply a clone of Unix. It's a lot of work, but absolutely nothing high tech or ground breaking there. A microkernel like HURD would have been somewhat innovative, but that never really happened, did it?
OS X is not FOSS. They use some open source programs for their userland, and that's about it. The fact that OS X is innovative, in your opinion, does not support, but discredits your point.
Apache is good software, but it does nothing that wasn't done dozens of times before. OpenSSH is good software, but simply a copy of the proprietary SSH programs and protocol. Not to mention that RSA, which makes SSH and SSL/TLS possible, was patented technology, developed by a company (not FOSS developers), and only just recently expired.
This is why most scientific advancement has historically come out of academia and government-sponsored research organizations.
You're welcome to try and prove it, as I don't believe this characterization for a moment. You might start by going through every single patent licensed by MPEG-LA and explain why every single one is either not important, or was actually developed by some government organization, rather than the corporation's name on the patent.
Government funded institutions certainly contribute a lot, but that is not to the exclusion of corporate R&D.
Research inside corporations is usually a dead end, because the results are kept private, or are patented to prevent others from building on them
Patents don't stop anyone else from continuing research on a subject, just the productization of something that is largely based on the patent (develop an idea far enough and it no longer resembles the patented method).
Complete baseless nonsense. It's exactly the opposite.
A few FOSS developers can't develop something so complex as an advanced video codec, without depending on using others' (patented) developments.
FOSS hasn't developed a lossy video codec that does utilize patented method either... At most, FOSS has only ever re-implements existing video codecs.
FOSS serves a purpose, but developing ground-breaking new technologies isn't it. That requires lots of money, and FOSS doesn't have it, nor would it be smart to waste money in such a way, if they did.
And open standards are only open because they're either not patent-encumbered, or the patent holders have a written agreement not to charge for using their patents in the context of the standard. Patents are detrimental to open anything.
Open standards are not patent-free. In fact, patents are the ONLY WAY a company can make any money with open standards.
Do you seriously, honestly think people will stop trying to one-up the competition without patents?
Not at all. They will just stop opening up those developments to the public. Eliminating patents gives companies only one way to make money, and that is proprietary software.
Without patents we'd have have a large number of competing and incompatible proprietary standards:
* instead of DVB-S, we'd have 4DTV/Digicipher, et al. * instead of AAC, we'd have VQF, et al. * instead of RSA, we'd have lots of weak, non-peer reviewed methods. * instead of MPEG-2, we'd be using numerous variations of Cinepak. * instead of CDs and DVDs we'd all be using Minidiscs and many other disparate MO formats.
etc.
People will just hide behind trade secrets, which they do already.
Indeed they will, which is exactly the problem. And furthermore, the relative ease of reverse engineering means we won't have big, singular standards, but a plethora of proprietary formats and standards, each with very small improvements over the last.
There might be less incentive to innovate, and at worst, progress may slow down.
I think you're significantly understating it, but at least we don't completely disagree.
On the other hand, an overly restrictive patent system like one where processes can be patented won't just slow down innovation, it can potentially stop it dead in its tracks.
There is "potential" for patents to be too restrictive, of course, but that's clearly not borne out by reality, as development does indeed continue. I'm certainly NOT opposed to software patent reforms, simply the idea that is spread so far and wide here, that they can be thrown out entirely, and all the problems in the world will magically be solved. Patents serve a very important purpose.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
It was not meant to be an ideal comparison, but an example that runs contrary to the assertion... Patents do NOT stop innovation. If you patent one method and do not license it on good terms, someone else will develop an alternative way of doing precisely the same thing. This is how it has always been, and there is evidence that factor HELPS the economy, and technological developments, rather than harming it.
It's perfectly fair to respond to the hypothetical question "What if the assembly line was patented?" with the similarly hypothetical answer: "Then someone else would have developed something BETTER, to circumvent the patent!"
Throughout the 1960s and '70s software was written without patent protection,
"Software" doesn't need patents. "Open standards" do.
FOOS projects show more software being written all the tyme without patents.
FOOS has yet to demonstrate development of a high quality video codec, without re-using numerous patented methods.
Even Theora, which had the good fortune to be based on the mature VP3.2 codec, has been in development for half a decade, with nominal quality improvements (it needs significant improvement to compete with MPEG-4 ASP, and tons to hope to compete with H.264/AVC), no performance improvements (it needs tons to compete with MPEG-4 ASP), etc. etc.
FOOS deserves a lot of credit, but pioneering groundbreaking new technologies is absolutely, positively, NOT one of them. Doing a better job implementing already developed technologies is an important goal, but it's a completely separate issue from the one addressed by software patents.
Especially if he has a lower resolution laptop display, in which case you can throw away tons of information with no loss in quality, since the HD source would have to be scaled down anyway.
With video compression, you get diminishing returns from downscaling. If you downscale by a factor of 4, you can only reduce your bitrate by a factor of 2, at best without much additional quality loss. You won't get anywhere near a factor of 5 reduction in bitrate (particularly if also downgrading to Divx in the process), unless you're downscaling to sub-DVD resolution.
Except that open standards and scientific sharing still flourishes where there are no software patents.
That is the case only because they can (and do) earn money off the software patents they file in other countries (the USA and Japan). It's a big enough market that it can prop up development in other countries, but it remains a prisoner's dilemma...
Should the USA decide to abolish software patents, things are going to quickly get very ugly.
Think about computing 20 years ago, what a difference.
Back then we merely had MPEG-1. But now, we're all the way up to 4. What a time to be alive.
Back then we merely had X11 for displaying graphics on our Unix systems... We must be up to X37 by now, right? And surely no one uses Unix systems any longer.
But in all seriousness, I don't object at all to significantly shortening the term of software patents. I do, however, find all arguments for completely abolishing them, entirely irrational, and borne from ignorance. Nobody bothers to offer any alternative system, it's just a bunch of reactionary whining.
A much lower-bitrate mp3 is listenable when compared to an mp2.
Not true at all. MP2 does need a higher bitrate, but not by too much (as I said, an MP3 can be about 33% smaller). And this is true today with GOOD MP3 encoders, while the difference was even less significant at the time.
I can't possibly guess the specific difference you saw, but it's certainly not typical, and does not reflect on the format.
Some codecs are invented for the sole purpose of adding meta-info to a media file, adding DRM, or changing the way it can be streamed (or not) over a network.
I happen to be a professional, and I know of NO such codecs. Not one.
DRM, metadata, and streaming are completely and totally independent of the underlying video and audio codecs.
many people are very happy with the quality that can be achieved with XviD using a few gigs of data and can barely tell the difference between that and a H.264 uber NEW 25+MBps HD+++ codec.
Some people are very happy with vinyl records. Some people are legally blind. That does not change the facts.
I will ignore the rest of your purely trolling comment.
but there at least you had the advantage that the storage space saved compared to even the best-compressed formats of the time was phenomenal.
Nonsense. MP2 was far less CPU intensive, while compressing about 33% poorer than MP3. Not a huge difference.
I freely admit that I absolutely do not "get" the HD fuss. It's the same thing we've had for years, with more pixels, that you can't reasonably see on a fair test past a certain distance
An arguement that would have been twice as appropriate to make when DVDs were coming out... After all, they're only about 3X higher resolution than VHS or VCDs... Highdef 1080, meanwhile, is 6X higher resolution than DVDs. And no, highdef pixels aren't magical faeries, you can see them just as well as the rest...
Where's the advantage in it when a "Blu-ray" PC can still play the DVD's of previous years but at much, much less expense...
A question you could ask of early adopters of any product.
Just plug the power in, rip the movies to your hard disk, and take the disc out.
Except the main consumer of power is maxing out the CPU to do the highdef H.264 decoding in real time.
Last time I checked, you could get a pretty good HD quality movie down to about 8GB with Divx, without any real quality drop.
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
"The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser," notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. That laser is one of the main things that conspire to raise power consumption.
If the laser in a Blu-ray drive uses remotely as much as your CPU or LCD backlight, you're going to be burning a hole through your laptop in just a few minutes... Where does the media go to always find these moronic analysts?
And if something can be easily re-implemented (i.e. CSS/deCSS), then does it really deserve the ability to stifle all competitors like patents do ?
It's pretty easy to "re-implement" newly developed pharmaceutical drugs as well...
The cost of development of both drugs and mathematical concepts (software) can be extremely high. And if you don't give companies the options of patents to protect their developments, you can immediately say goodbye to all open standards and scientific sharing. It'll all instantly switch to undocumented and obfusticated binary-only code. And since reverse engineering is simply too easy, the only workable model will be to create a new product with the advent of each incremental improvement they come up with. The cost of developing something advanced like H.264 can't exactly be covered by selling support books...
How do you think the world would have been if Ford had patented the assembly line ?
How do you think the world would have been if the Wright brothers had patented the airplane?
Oh, that's right, they did... Not only did their patents NOT drag the industry down, it spurred the development of alternate ways to achieve flight, which soon after gave us the methods we know and use today... That nice new Boeing 787 doesn't exactly use "wing warping" now does it?
And I should point out that DVD-CSS is NOT patented, and the assembly line no doubt would not have been unique enough to be patented, or at least would have had more than enough prior art in slaughter houses to invalidate it quickly.
It doesn't solve the "wait hours for fsck after unclean unmount",
Yes, it did. UFS2 added background fsck, so you boot-up immediately (faster than with journaled filesystems), and can use the system indefinitely. Meanwhile, fsck runs at a low priority, in the background, to do the basic cleanup needed.
I already explained that not only does it NOT help your example in any way, but makes the explanation unnecessarily magical an uninformative. Having taught at various levels for several years, I do have a fairly good ability to explain to laymen, and without resorting to rather inaccurate characterizations.
For empirical evidence, I'll note that one of us sounds like a pedantic nerd with a tweed fetish, while the other is currently modded at +5.
If I happened to read through the comments before you, I would have posted a similar explanation, without so much inaccuracy, and similarly have gotten a +5 mod. It's happened plenty of times before. It's simply a fact of life that what I had to say was not really on topic, even if it happens to be helpful and important.
Mod points is no kind of metric of person's relative worth, as you'll learn some day when you grow up, so you're welcome to keep your whining little insults to yourself. Just saying.
Disney has the multi-billion dollar warchest to make sure any process you require, any form you mandate, any hoop you establish, will be accomplished exactly as the law dictates.
You're looking at it from the "paperwork" perspective, rather than the "tax" perspective.
Consider patents and copyrights being taxed like normal property... An assessor decides how much it's worth every year, and requires you to pay maybe 5% of that in taxes. This will be a trivial fee for the starving artist, and a huge fee for a Disney movie, no matter how many lawyers they have... Though, this is a regressive scheme, which does somewhat favor Disney.
Consider a system where copyright extensions must be paid every year (after the first 10) at an exponentially increasing fee each time... Now, the starving artist has 10 years, and if he's making any money on it, he can afford to extend it by 1 or two more years. Meanwhile, Disney doesn't want their work to enter the public domain after 10 years, they want to keep it artifically locked up in the "Disney Vault" for a decade, and then re-release it at utterly ridiculous prices... They can still do that, but in return they'll paying ridiculously large amounts of cash to the government that gives them the right to do so.
Then, the system will be quite fair. Out of print works won't be automatically locked up for centuries, and the public domain won't continue to be starved. Those who wish to rob the public domain, have to make up for by paying out increasing sums of hard cash to the very same public.
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So instead of fixing the problem, we should all throw out the baby with the bathwater, eliminating patents all together, and condemning the many companies who have legitimate reasons and needs for patents.
That's one hell of a burden of proof to put on yourself. I don't believe you can POSSIBLY prove that to be the case in any objective way, so the only thing you can argue is a few anecdotes, and what your personal opinion happens to be... Not at all a convincing case.
No, actually you have to disagree.
Everyone wants to abolish software patents, so they can use the research that went into them without paying, but NOBODY wants to propose ANY alternatives for financial compensation to those who develop such technology. I guess it's going to be up to the magical fairies to develop MPEG-5, 802.11z, et al. for us.
Eliminating software patents will quickly give a boost to free and open source software, and shortly thereafter thrust us all into a dystopian future, where there are NO open standards, very little technological development, and endless new incompatible and proprietary video/audio codecs, wired/wireless communications methods, internet protocols, and hardware designs.
Indeed it will. When the last large country follow's Europe's lead and jumps at the prisoner's dilemma (of patents) for their own benefit, the remaining few will not possibly be enough to prop up the system.
No. Because of patents, it's EASY to create a high quality video codec.
The flip side of that wonderful advantage is that you have to pay licensing fees to the developers of the technology.
A "quality codec is difficult". End of story. Copying someone else, who has done the hard work, is easy. YOU just want to be able to do so without compensating them for their work that has helped you out so very much.
All the knowledge about HOW to make a good quality codec was developed by corporations, with a profit motive in mind. Obviously, if you abolish software patents, then we all get "free money" so to speak for a very short time, but at that point, we all get stuck where we are, as nobody will spend any money to advance the technology further.
Who wouldn't want to create a lossy codec?
Linux is simply a clone of Unix. It's a lot of
work, but absolutely nothing high tech or ground breaking there. A microkernel like HURD would have been somewhat innovative, but that never really happened, did it?
OS X is not FOSS. They use some open source programs for their userland, and that's about it. The fact that OS X is innovative, in your opinion, does not support, but discredits your point.
Apache is good software, but it does nothing that wasn't done dozens of times before. OpenSSH is good software, but simply a copy of the proprietary SSH programs and protocol. Not to mention that RSA, which makes SSH and SSL/TLS possible, was patented technology, developed by a company (not FOSS developers), and only just recently expired.
You're welcome to try and prove it, as I don't believe this characterization for a moment. You might start by going through every single patent licensed by MPEG-LA and explain why every single one is either not important, or was actually developed by some government organization, rather than the corporation's name on the patent.
Government funded institutions certainly contribute a lot, but that is not to the exclusion of corporate R&D.
Patents don't stop anyone else from continuing research on a subject, just the productization of something that is largely based on the patent (develop an idea far enough and it no longer resembles the patented method).
Complete baseless nonsense. It's exactly the opposite.
A few FOSS developers can't develop something so complex as an advanced video codec, without depending on using others' (patented) developments.
FOSS hasn't developed a lossy video codec that does utilize patented method either... At most, FOSS has only ever re-implements existing video codecs.
FOSS serves a purpose, but developing ground-breaking new technologies isn't it. That requires lots of money, and FOSS doesn't have it, nor would it be smart to waste money in such a way, if they did.
Open standards are not patent-free. In fact, patents are the ONLY WAY a company can make any money with open standards.
Not at all. They will just stop opening up those developments to the public. Eliminating patents gives companies only one way to make money, and that is proprietary software.
Without patents we'd have have a large number of competing and incompatible proprietary standards:
* instead of DVB-S, we'd have 4DTV/Digicipher, et al.
* instead of AAC, we'd have VQF, et al.
* instead of RSA, we'd have lots of weak, non-peer reviewed methods.
* instead of MPEG-2, we'd be using numerous variations of Cinepak.
* instead of CDs and DVDs we'd all be using Minidiscs and many other disparate MO formats.
etc.
Indeed they will, which is exactly the problem. And furthermore, the relative ease of reverse engineering means we won't have big, singular standards, but a plethora of proprietary formats and standards, each with very small improvements over the last.
I think you're significantly understating it, but at least we don't completely disagree.
There is "potential" for patents to be too restrictive, of course, but that's clearly not borne out by reality, as development does indeed continue. I'm certainly NOT opposed to software patent reforms, simply the idea that is spread so far and wide here, that they can be thrown out entirely, and all the problems in the world will magically be solved. Patents serve a very important purpose.
It was not meant to be an ideal comparison, but an example that runs contrary to the assertion... Patents do NOT stop innovation. If you patent one method and do not license it on good terms, someone else will develop an alternative way of doing precisely the same thing. This is how it has always been, and there is evidence that factor HELPS the economy, and technological developments, rather than harming it.
It's perfectly fair to respond to the hypothetical question "What if the assembly line was patented?" with the similarly hypothetical answer: "Then someone else would have developed something BETTER, to circumvent the patent!"
Gah! You've got me making the same typos now... That should be FOSS of course.
"Software" doesn't need patents. "Open standards" do.
FOOS has yet to demonstrate development of a high quality video codec, without re-using numerous patented methods.
Even Theora, which had the good fortune to be based on the mature VP3.2 codec, has been in development for half a decade, with nominal quality improvements (it needs significant improvement to compete with MPEG-4 ASP, and tons to hope to compete with H.264/AVC), no performance improvements (it needs tons to compete with MPEG-4 ASP), etc. etc.
FOOS deserves a lot of credit, but pioneering groundbreaking new technologies is absolutely, positively, NOT one of them. Doing a better job implementing already developed technologies is an important goal, but it's a completely separate issue from the one addressed by software patents.
With video compression, you get diminishing returns from downscaling. If you downscale by a factor of 4, you can only reduce your bitrate by a factor of 2, at best without much additional quality loss. You won't get anywhere near a factor of 5 reduction in bitrate (particularly if also downgrading to Divx in the process), unless you're downscaling to sub-DVD resolution.
It's a nice theory, but still doesn't add up.
You could also do way more than either, and save money, if you bought a desktop PC instead...
It's all a question of size and weight, and the EEE no doubt easily beats the Dell cheapo junk in that category easily.
That is the case only because they can (and do) earn money off the software patents they file in other countries (the USA and Japan). It's a big enough market that it can prop up development in other countries, but it remains a prisoner's dilemma...
Should the USA decide to abolish software patents, things are going to quickly get very ugly.
Back then we merely had MPEG-1. But now, we're all the way up to 4. What a time to be alive.
Back then we merely had X11 for displaying graphics on our Unix systems... We must be up to X37 by now, right? And surely no one uses Unix systems any longer.
But in all seriousness, I don't object at all to significantly shortening the term of software patents. I do, however, find all arguments for completely abolishing them, entirely irrational, and borne from ignorance. Nobody bothers to offer any alternative system, it's just a bunch of reactionary whining.
Quicktime is a multimedia player and encoder program, just like Windows Media Player or Real.
The file format is MOV (and MP4, a subset of MOV).
The most recent video codec is H.264
The most recent audio codec is AAC.
Of course it has used many other video and audio codecs over the years.
Not true at all. MP2 does need a higher bitrate, but not by too much (as I said, an MP3 can be about 33% smaller). And this is true today with GOOD MP3 encoders, while the difference was even less significant at the time.
I can't possibly guess the specific difference you saw, but it's certainly not typical, and does not reflect on the format.
Matroska is a container format; it is not a codec, in any sense, and is never referred to as such by anyone with any knowledge of the subject.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary. And one vastly over-simplified summary explanation does not change the definition.
"developing a new theorem" does not require "millions of dollars" but it is, still, very expensive, and results in completely original results.
Look into the cost of developing H.264 for yourself rather than passive aggressively making an ass of yourself.
I happen to be a professional, and I know of NO such codecs. Not one.
DRM, metadata, and streaming are completely and totally independent of the underlying video and audio codecs.
Some people are very happy with vinyl records. Some people are legally blind. That does not change the facts.
I will ignore the rest of your purely trolling comment.
Nonsense. MP2 was far less CPU intensive, while compressing about 33% poorer than MP3. Not a huge difference.
An arguement that would have been twice as appropriate to make when DVDs were coming out... After all, they're only about 3X higher resolution than VHS or VCDs... Highdef 1080, meanwhile, is 6X higher resolution than DVDs. And no, highdef pixels aren't magical faeries, you can see them just as well as the rest...
A question you could ask of early adopters of any product.
Except the main consumer of power is maxing out the CPU to do the highdef H.264 decoding in real time.
Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.
How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.
If the laser in a Blu-ray drive uses remotely as much as your CPU or LCD backlight, you're going to be burning a hole through your laptop in just a few minutes... Where does the media go to always find these moronic analysts?
It's pretty easy to "re-implement" newly developed pharmaceutical drugs as well...
The cost of development of both drugs and mathematical concepts (software) can be extremely high. And if you don't give companies the options of patents to protect their developments, you can immediately say goodbye to all open standards and scientific sharing. It'll all instantly switch to undocumented and obfusticated binary-only code. And since reverse engineering is simply too easy, the only workable model will be to create a new product with the advent of each incremental improvement they come up with. The cost of developing something advanced like H.264 can't exactly be covered by selling support books...
How do you think the world would have been if the Wright brothers had patented the airplane?
Oh, that's right, they did... Not only did their patents NOT drag the industry down, it spurred the development of alternate ways to achieve flight, which soon after gave us the methods we know and use today... That nice new Boeing 787 doesn't exactly use "wing warping" now does it?
And I should point out that DVD-CSS is NOT patented, and the assembly line no doubt would not have been unique enough to be patented, or at least would have had more than enough prior art in slaughter houses to invalidate it quickly.
God-damn privoxy... Let's try that again... background fsck...
Yes, it did. UFS2 added background fsck, so you boot-up immediately (faster than with journaled filesystems), and can use the system indefinitely. Meanwhile, fsck runs at a low priority, in the background, to do the basic cleanup needed.
I already explained that not only does it NOT help your example in any way, but makes the explanation unnecessarily magical an uninformative. Having taught at various levels for several years, I do have a fairly good ability to explain to laymen, and without resorting to rather inaccurate characterizations.
If I happened to read through the comments before you, I would have posted a similar explanation, without so much inaccuracy, and similarly have gotten a +5 mod. It's happened plenty of times before. It's simply a fact of life that what I had to say was not really on topic, even if it happens to be helpful and important.
Mod points is no kind of metric of person's relative worth, as you'll learn some day when you grow up, so you're welcome to keep your whining little insults to yourself. Just saying.
You're looking at it from the "paperwork" perspective, rather than the "tax" perspective.
Consider patents and copyrights being taxed like normal property... An assessor decides how much it's worth every year, and requires you to pay maybe 5% of that in taxes. This will be a trivial fee for the starving artist, and a huge fee for a Disney movie, no matter how many lawyers they have... Though, this is a regressive scheme, which does somewhat favor Disney.
Consider a system where copyright extensions must be paid every year (after the first 10) at an exponentially increasing fee each time... Now, the starving artist has 10 years, and if he's making any money on it, he can afford to extend it by 1 or two more years. Meanwhile, Disney doesn't want their work to enter the public domain after 10 years, they want to keep it artifically locked up in the "Disney Vault" for a decade, and then re-release it at utterly ridiculous prices... They can still do that, but in return they'll paying ridiculously large amounts of cash to the government that gives them the right to do so.
Then, the system will be quite fair. Out of print works won't be automatically locked up for centuries, and the public domain won't continue to be starved. Those who wish to rob the public domain, have to make up for by paying out increasing sums of hard cash to the very same public.