Yes, exactly that model. In practice, you would treat that 4-year-old work as "under copyright" the same way everything written is under copyright today. This sort of thing gives you a chance to market your creative work with protection and avoid paying fees until you know that it is valuable. That would then allow the fees to be relatively high since only people with valuable IP would pay.

The alternative is that everyone's blog enters the public domain immediately upon writing unless they want to pay $XXX per article, which also seems wrong to me.