Rather than a renewal fee, why not basically just go all the way with "intellectual property", and start treating it as such? You can own it if you want, but please pay the property tax. Or you can always surrender it to the public domain, if the taxes get too onerous.
I'd even go one step further, and make it a progressive tax proportional to the duration the work has been copyrighted. Initial grace period of a few years is free, then a very modest rate, but after a couple of decades it starts to ramp up really high. If it's that valuable, you can keep paying it off the profits as long as you want.
Same thing with estates. Inheriting a copyright? Fine - but there's a tax on that (with the usual applicable caps etc).
And said tax receipts could be specifically allocated to, say, fund libraries, free public Internet, and other forms of storing and distributing information and works of art for the benefit of all.
If you care about such things this word be a death sentence for basically all Free Software licenses like Apache, BSD, GPL, etc. -- basically everything except MIT and WTFPL since it would be progressively more expensive to maintain the requirements of the license.
Assuming a 14 year copyright that would mean gcc 3.0 enters the public domain but the current version obviously has it's own duration. I don't see why they should get special treatment. Do they really need copyright of 14 year old versions of software and monopolise it? Are they that scared that someone takes some old version of gcc and uses it for a commercial application? Also nothing stops you from taking a public domain work (even your own) and slapping a new license on top of it if all you care about is the license not the monopoly.
Also the way the current copyright system works means those free software licenses are already "dead" by your definition. It's just through pure chance that the duration keeps getting extended retroactively. The only difference between the current system and the proposed system is in the duration and the fact that in the old system all works had effectively the same duration again through pure chance because it's based on the lifetime of the author.
Reading RMS opinion, he said either 10 years or a escrow for source code (so that proprietary software really do end up public domain).
14 years seems plenty enough that its really shouldn't have any real impact on copyleft. Bugs, security patches, and plain reality changes makes 14 year old software kind of unusable. Many applications that is 14 years old won't even start on modern system and hardware.
However I don't think it would work in practice, for the same reason public domain suffers now which is corporate lobbying. Fit to purpose, well thought out laws do not survive it.
It's the collective maturity of people that has to change. When the powerful elite is able to value culture more than their personal agenda, we could see some change. But that is a distant future if at all.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I would think this to be the case already.
Company has an asset whose value increases, that needs to be booked and eventually declared as income AFAIK. I'm really not a good accountant when it comes to IP but I think that's the general idea.
I'd even go one step further, and make it a progressive tax proportional to the duration the work has been copyrighted. Initial grace period of a few years is free, then a very modest rate, but after a couple of decades it starts to ramp up really high. If it's that valuable, you can keep paying it off the profits as long as you want.
Same thing with estates. Inheriting a copyright? Fine - but there's a tax on that (with the usual applicable caps etc).
And said tax receipts could be specifically allocated to, say, fund libraries, free public Internet, and other forms of storing and distributing information and works of art for the benefit of all.