Copyright Law
This web site and all postings (C) Patrick Fleming. Copyright set to expire sometime around 2100 assuming no changes in current copyright law that extend this “protection”. Ridiculous? You bet! Who cares about my rantings enough to copy them and try to make money from them? Propably no-one.
From Slashdot:
“Copyright protection isn’t a privilege, unless you start with the assumption that nobody has the right to publish anything unless the government specifically says so. That’s not true, at least not in the US or UK. Rather, copyright is a restriction imposed on everybody other than the copyright holder. But more than that, it is a Contract between the copyright holder and the public. The public pays for the government to protect the material for a limited time, and at the end of that time the public gets free access to the material. That eventual free access is the payoff to the public, in exchange for the expense of maintaining and enforcing the copyright system. The copy-making industry, which has largely turned into a rights-control industry, takes the very different position that the only thing the public is ever entitled to is the privilege of paying to use whatever material is offered, under whatever conditions are imposed by the rights holder. This is a new and one-sided philosophy, which does not reflect the way copyright was ever meant to function. What’s wrong with the US Congress extending copyright for the entire useful life of the material is that the public essentially gets nothing of value when the copyright expires. That’s assuming that Congress ever actually does let copyrights expire from now on. The US Supreme Court has specifically ruled that “a limited time” can mean “forever” if Congress says so.
http://slashdot.org/~serutan ”
And now onto my opinion 
- Software actively being developed, supported or sold should continue to be protected for say 3 to 5 years after the end of any two of the three. Software that has been abandoned by the developer, orphaned as a company goes out of business or the developer loses interest it should become public domain and the code should be available to end users. If it’s still worth protection by the US Copyright Act, it should still be worth active development, support and sale. Consider the hypothetical (by not unrealistic) case of oh, let’s say a jail booking and inventory system. Such a system would be used by a decently large percentage of all jails/police departments across the United States but would also necessarily have a narrow audience. I would guess that there probably only 10 producers of such software due to the limited audience and most of those would have similar features. If a company built a great package with few bugs and most features desired by the users, the saturation point would be reached pretty quickly. If it’s the only thing the company does they may be in trouble and so might the end user as the demand for software falls. Unless ongoing developement and/or support is provided to the end users this software will probably end up being orphaned. Once the users start upgrading their hardware after 5-6 years (which was bought to last 2-3 years, but was kept in service due to budget constraints and the fact that the Y2k bug has already been fixed) the software is no longer available and the process of finding a new vendor that can provide similar functionality and -hopefully- maintain the data must begin anew. There is nowhere to grab code from the old company. It’s just gone. In this case automatically becoming Public Domain would potentially help to reduce software development, training, support and upgrade costs which in theory reduces the cost of running public services such as the jail in this case and reduces the necessity of raising taxes and governmental borrowing.
- Music still available for sale should be protected by a reasonable copyright period. 50 years from original publication date is reasonable is it not? Current copyright law “protects” the copyright holder for life plus something like 70 years. Considering that most producers of copyright material don’t live past their own lifetime the life plus concept is skewed in favor of companies. I am not in favor of swapping music or other copyrighted files on the internet. In fact, I don’t do it, nor do I listen to music on the internet. I personally prefer a ‘clean’ copy. One that has the quality that the artist/director put their time into creating. One that I can put into any player that I wish to listen to it on without additional restrictions beyond the purchase price. I want to be able to listen to a CD on my computer, in my car or on my MP3 player- no restrictions, no “Digital Rights Management”. In some cases, even the original artist cannot even get a legal copy of their own works because, even though it is no longer a profitable work (if it ever was), the copyright holder- usually a big company- will not sell a legal copy. Here is one artist’s very interesting take on MP3s and the internet
- The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has the effect of making criminals out of ordinary citizens. If I want to make a backup copy of a CD or – perhaps because I have four children who like music but are horrible to their CDs, leaving them on the floor so that they end up walking on, scratching, breaking or losing them- to make a copy to listen to and leave the original on the shelf I should not have to break the law (as is the case with some artists/labels) in order to do so. “Fair Use” should be just that- fair. I am not selling the copies, merely reducing the cost of broken, scratched and unusable CDs to less than $1.00.
- There are some who like to say “software wants to be free” or “ideas want to be free”. I don’t completely agree. Inanimate objects cannot “want” or “need”. The idea that information or ideas freely available or shared with others can be built into better ideas has been known in the scientific community for many years. Copyright laws are used to prevent sharing and use of ideas not merely a particular order of words. Ideas should be available to be discussed, expanded upon, extracted from, massaged, manipulated and generally free of encumberments.
- Sharing published works leads to increased sales for the publisher. Baen book publishing company has placed many of their copyrighted materials online as the Baen Public Library. The concept is simple, the more people get to read the works represented, the more they will want to purchase a hard copy. So far they believe the concept works resulting in an increase in sales of new books. Used book stores and libraries have the same overall effect.
