Trademarks as a consumer protection are also fine.

Copyright, for a LIMITED time (say 10 years without registration, and renewed in 10 year blocks //with// registration and steeply increasing fee) sounds like it'd be helpful to the economy as well as encourage creators of high quality content to register.

The exponentially increasing fee would also be a way of keeping actively stewarded and relevant properties under maintenance.

I also think that, similar to song covers, a maximum compelled fee for reproduction should also exist (to prevent with-holding content from the public).

Putting up more barriers to protection would do nothing to protect authors or encourage their creativity. Most works protected by copyright have no value and aren't even worth registering. Of those that are registered, most aren't worth renewing. But if those works weren't protected, non-authors could exploit high-quality, unrecognized works instead of expending resources to create something new.

An obvious example might be the brilliant novel that goes ignored by critics. If it were to easily lose copyright protection, then a producer could adapt it into a movie and pay the author nothing. But there are thousands of great novels (and many more terrible ones) for every successful one, so you need to protect all of them, and do so cheaply, in order to make sure the successful one is protected.

I'm talking about net, not individual instances.

There was a recent HN thread about Germany's economic boom in the 19th century being largely due to no copyright law - and a huge proliferation of technical books of every description.

In the US, Hollywood was started to evade patent enforcement. Isn't it ironic how they aggressively defend IP protection now?

"Harry Potter" is an example of copyright. Care to provide similar example for patents?

There are some very popular consumer products like Dyson fans and vacuums that enjoy patent protection. They've expanded the market and spurred new innovation in a stale market.