Posted on 11/16/2012 11:46:08 PM PST by Utmost Certainty
Using today’s copyright laws, one can copyright an ‘idea’ or ‘phrase’, not a work or invention. This has been done usually in the high tech field and has had a chilling affect on development: why work on a project if someone has copyrighted the ‘idea’ but has not created a prototype or actually invented/developed the item resulting from an abstract idea?
I am a firm believer that copyrights should be limited in scope to true works or inventions, not a phrase (an exception would be a commercial or marketing copyright) or abstract idea which I believe is chilling on industry.
As an artist I would be very reluctant to have my creations duplicated and sold without stringent copyright laws in existence. My heirs should be able to benefit for some period of time as I am now 60-years old.
Two hundred years ago, people did not live as long as today’s population. Some inventions take a while to become established and earn money for the inventor, or the artist/writer who created it. Perhaps 14-years should be extended to some greater length of time, say 25-years, with an extension of another 15-years? That, to me, would be equitable.
At least the KJV Bible is not under copyright like most all the rest, wrongly in my opinion, as is criminalizes free sharing of it, with attribution to the source, of anything done by a Christian ministry for gospel work. However, those who seek to make money off such without permission of the source, if living and possible, should be prosecuted.
Certainly it cost money to do things like make videos, but if God called us into ministry of faith then we must trust Him who “gave at the cross” to provide His workers with what is needed to do the work He called them to.
Which He will in His mercy and grace, and insomuch as we practice Mt. 6:33, in patience and faith (which i need to do better).
Outside that, i think anything put out in public, as on the web, should be expected and allowed to be personally saved, and not just one archival copy as regards digital data as is presently allowed. But never sold without permission.
And i believe the 70 year extension of copyright after the authors death is too long.
Baloney. Innovation occurs naturally. Daily. Copyright laws have nothing to do with innovation. They were created to protect intellectual property.
You want a perfect example of how a large body of public domain works encourages creativity? Well, look no further than Disney. Most of those classic Disney tales were, in fact, reworked versions of the creations of other people that were in the public domain. Snow White (Brothers Grimm), Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling), The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen), Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo), the list goes on.
The change in life expectancy hasn’t been that great - the statistics were skewed by an extremely high infant immortality rate. The expected lifespan of an adult of age 20 in 1850 was 60 years. Nowadays, it’s around 76 years. So, only a 16 year increase.
That is not an accurate statement. Sites like JSTOR do not provide materials for free or at a nominal fee.
The IEEE and similar organizations do not give free access to their journals, nor is the cost of access nominal.
Even working for a firm that has a blanket IEEE license is no solution. Our company must now pay larger fees to gain access to the same number or fewer journals. They have decided to cancel some subscriptions to those journals which are consulted less frequently. So our company is now "saving" thousands of dollars a year by not keeping up those subscriptions, but then will end up losing thousands when employees spend hours trying to access that information, or not having access to it, end up reinventing the wheel.
“But what innovation comes from cheap imitation of someone’s original content?”
Um, movies? Thomas Edison nearly strangled the nascent motion picture industry. His enforcers charged a fee if you made a movie. His enforcers charged a fee if you made a motion picture camera. In short, Edison got a cut if you did anything involving light, shadow, and moving pictures.
That could not have been the Founders’ intent. It would be like Guttenberg getting a cut on every printing press.
That’s why Hollywood fled to, well, Hollywood. The myth is “for the weather.” The reality was to get away from the Edison police.
“You want a perfect example of how a large body of public domain works encourages creativity? Well, look no further than Disney. “
And paradoxically, Disney has managed to exempt themselves from the very public domain laws by which they’ve amassed great wealth — they shamelessly gamed Congress into extending their Mickey Mouse copyright forever.
(And no, it won’t expire in a hundred years. We’ll all be dead, and the Disney lawyers will get another extension.)
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