Comment by ssl-3
Those are great answers.
I'd like to propose the following additions to help tie it all together:
Copyright must be registered. Registration requires sending a digital copy to some officious government body, such as the Library of Congress, for preservation. (It used to be ~about this way; it can be this way again. Disk is cheap. Git and email both exist. It can be figured out.)
This registration will be open and publicly-available to query (online, of course, but also by phone, and mail, and just by walking in the front door and asking), so the question of "Who to pay" is always easily answered.
All forfeited money from licensing goes to help pay for the preservation of the collected works, and for the ongoing expense of providing the registration database. It won't be nearly enough to cover those expenses, and that's fine: This means that the balance always has a place to land.
Copyright should not span generations. It should still time out completely, and do so after a period that is shorter than a normal human lifespan.
If a person saw a film when they were 5 that they really enjoyed, and if they manage to live long enough, then they should eventually be able to walk into the Library of Congress, give them some money, and walk out with a physical copy of it, and be able to freely upload that copy of it to YouCloud for their great, great grandchildren (and indeed, the world) to see, and be able to do all of this without becoming a criminal.
(How much money? Something in the realm of 15 Big Macs worth of dollars sounds about right.)
> Copyright must be registered.
https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_04_e.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention This would require the country to back out of the Berne Convention and TRIPS (and by implication the WTO). Protection of copyright is automatic and does not require registration.Just because I haven't sent the latest batch of photographs to the Library of Congress for registration (so I can collect punitive damages rather than just compensatory damages) doesn't mean that the images that I have created are not copyrighted and protected.