I think first 5 years should be free, then the author declares the value of their work to be X and pays a yearly tax of 0.05 * X to keep for copyright for as long as they want.
To make sure they dont put a low X, have anyone be able to buy the copyright from the author for X. If someone wants to buy, author can raise X to keep their copyright.
This is a nice system because it is naturally progressive and balanced, huge corps with billion $ IP will finally start paying a ton to have the gov keep enforcing their copyrights.
The only way this would be a nice system is that it would icentivise everyone to make everything free and open source, or don't create anything at all, since if you create siomething with the intention to get value from it, anyone else can decide to take it from you simply because they are Apple and you don't have the 100k to stop them. It's already bad enough that big companies can buy smaller companies just by waving the cash at the owners, and all the Figma, Centos, etc users get to suck it.
Except that it wouldn't even be nice in that sarcastic way, because what happens to copyleft in that world? I think it's critically important that the "you may have but not steal this" in GPL doesn't expire in a mere 5 years, and no one has to pay hundreds of thousands to prevent a big for-profit company from stealing something that they could have had for free anyway.
The problem with a lot of these systems is that copyrighting happens at the time of creation whether you register or not. If you don’t register, it may be harder to prove someone is violating your copyright in court, but it is still the IP of the creator (or employer of the creator if a contract was signed). I guess you could argue that if you haven’t bothered filing for copyright after 5 years the value is approximately $0, but that poses the following problem:
Let’s say I make a web comic that’s basically worthless for 5 years. Then, after 8 years Jimmy Fallon or some other late night show sees it and shows it on the air. Overnight, my old comics, which I have implicitly valued at $0.00 or close to $0.00, become incredibly popular. Disney or an IP troll or whoever can come along and then buy my early comics for pennies before I realize what happened and I get nothing.
To make sure they dont put a low X, have anyone be able to buy the copyright from the author for X. If someone wants to buy, author can raise X to keep their copyright.
This is a nice system because it is naturally progressive and balanced, huge corps with billion $ IP will finally start paying a ton to have the gov keep enforcing their copyrights.