How long should patents and copyrights protect is the heart of the question under discussion. Naturally creators and inventors want the protection to last as long as possible and the public should want it to last long enough to keep inventors and creators motivated to do their thing, but short enough to give everybody else a chance to get on the bandwagon and improve. Democrats, close cousins of communists, extended copyrights substantially beyond anything reasonable. That is why software authors are far more interested in copyright protection instead of patent protection. And defending patents against infringers or circumventers is far more difficult than defending copyright claims.
Kwasi has confused the roles of capitalists and communists in this debate because of the confusion over copyrights. Gates is not the good guy and the open source folks are not the communists. Microsoft has already had reasonable protection for its inventions. The same is true of authors, playwrights, movie producers, entertainment artists etc. Congress will be the arbiters of these disputes and has some homework to do before it determines what is reasonable copyright and patent protection. As always, government planning is an oxymoron and they have let things get badly out of balance. It is predictable that they will swing too far the otherway.
This is so far a thread full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Feel free to waste more band width by airing your opinions on a discussion that will matter but be held elsewhere sometime in the future. The US has several problems of considerably greater importance and of a much more urgent nature. Here is one that needs to be addressed before it becomes too late. The archive contains a great deal more on the subject.