Posted on 12/10/2012 8:49:45 AM PST by ksen
Derek Khanna, the Republican House staffer who wrote an eminently sensible paper on copyright reform that was retracted less than a day later has been fired. So much for the GOP's drive to attract savvy, net-centric young voters. After all, this is the party that put SOPA's daddy in charge of the House Tech and Science Committee.
But it's pretty terrible for Khanna -- what a shabby way of dealing with dissent within your ranks.
Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright-reform memo [Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica] (via /.)
Copyright should only mean “I got here first”.
Copyright reform AND Patent reform are long overdue
You have people wasting hours and hours filing patent requests for the stupidest of things
I worked for one company who invited a guy to every technology meetingt and we wasted at least half of each meeting with him butting in with comments about filing for a patent for anything anyone said
If you invent something new, or somethign you THINK is new, you should just be able to submit a simple form, and then it is registered and stamped with the date
There should be no need to search every exiting patent to see if something resembles it, that costs a lot of time and money
just file it, and then it is up to you to defend it, if someone else makes a million bucks off the idea.
Of interest PING!
As a writer and the spouse of a composer, I disgree. The copyright laws are too lax and limited - they should be perpetual, just like property ownership.
You write a poem about a tree. Should no one ever again be able to write a poem about a tree without giving you a royalty?
That would be unconstitutional:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The harsh reality is that the government exists to self-perpetuate and to grow in size and power. The very idea that it should be efficient and/or useful in its operation is a long-gone, quaint notion.
The fed gov is in desperate need of a major overhaul, and Copyright/Patent problems are only a symptom of the cancer.
kabumpo... the whole purpose of the constitutional protection for intellectual property is to encourage creators to continue to create by ensuring that, for a time, they can profit from their ideas. But the ultimate principle behind it is to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Protecting IP perpetually stifles this goal, because those who stand to perpetually profit from one great idea are dissuaded from continuing to produce great ideas. Additionally, perpetual protections would limit innovation based on previous ideas - either by limiting the knowledge that others have, or making it financially unfeasible (through royalties, etc.) to improve a previous idea.
If anything, the current copyright laws are too restrictive. 28 years (and 14 more if you bother to pay attention to renew) -- the provisions of the Copyright Act of 1831 -- are plenty enough. The idea that one work should provide royalties for the entire lifetime of the author plus several generations (as is currently the case) is patently absurd.
Perpetual copyrights would be a cultural disaster. Forget school fine arts programs, they couldn’t pay the licensing fees. It would be great for this generation of composers, but that’s about it, since there wouldn’t be much in the way of the next generation.
Another interpretation of the article is that young people love stealing copyrighted work, don’t respect the concept of copyright to begin with, don’t understand why downloading music for free is illegal, think it’s find to film movies in theaters and upload them to torrent sites, and the GOP is going to have trouble reaching these young people if they keep respecting the idea of copyright.
You know which young people are NOT looking to amend copyright laws? Young people who have become artists, who keep getting their work stolen when they can barely make a living on it anyway.
That's because the government is too big and too corrupt.
The GOP and the government became hostile to technology when W too office.
No, it is not absurd. A writer can spend ten years writing a book, living in dire poverty the entire time. He can live in abject isolation and lose his health, he can sustain permanent physical and emotional damage from trying to bring one book or piece of music to life. If the work later becomes acknowledged as a masterpiece, of course he and his heirs should have the right to benefit from his unique gifts and his extraordinary sacrifices.
You seem not to understand the basic concept of literature. The copyright isn’t based on subject matter - a tree, a rose, the sunrise, etc.
There are many poems, songs, etc. on many subjects. It is the unique work of the author that has the copyright. The topic of trees is not the point. The point is the individual work - Housman’s poem, “Loveliest of trees! The cherry now/is hung with bloom along the bough...”
Well, you don’t know what the licensing fees would necessarily be, so your statement is invalid. And arts schools are actually stifling creation these days, so your point is moot.
Thank you. You seem to be the only other person here who understands that art is not the same as a gadget, like a new kind of can opener.
Art and technology are not the same, and it is typical of the dunderhead philistinism one encounters on the Right to equate them. And then everyone complains that the Left has total control of arts and letters. Part of the reason for that is demonstrated in this thread.
the GOP:
Winning the hearts and minds of lobbyist
Losing the hearts and minds of everyone else
Change your registration to independent. They need to see the more consequences besides the disastrous election of 2012.
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