> Authors own a copyright over their work for a limited amount of time, then it is escheated to the public domain. While a work is under copyright, you need to get permission to copy it.
This is the absolute dumbest idea I could have imagined. Like, this is the sort of thing you'd make as an argumentum ad absurdum against copyright maximalism. You literally cannot legally create new works without an unpaid public domain backing them.
...That being said, some kind of state-run licensing scheme could fix some of the bigger problems with long copyright terms. i.e. maybe you only get 20 years of fully exclusive licensing, and then the rest of your life+70 term is compulsory licensing royalties from the state. But I doubt you'd ever see that given how the entire international copyright system is basically non-negotiable nowadays.
They usually solve that problem by requiring state royalty only if the work has elements derived from the work that is in the public domain but nothing derived from currently copyrightable works. Algeria and Burundi are examples of countries that have paying public domain.
In the most of the world. In certain jurisdictions, public domain actually means you have to pay the state instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paying_public_domain