[Robert_Paulson2]

copyright in the us was originally seven years.
that was the original agreement with the people.. and government.

now it's seventy... or more, in fact today's living corporations can continuously update copyrights and maintain them in perpetuity.

There is one web spider that all it does... is look for anything that is or sounds similar to copyrighted, patented, or registered trademark references on web pages, just to harvest potential ip addresses for ongoing threats of lawsuits... and out of court settlements.

copyrights ought to be reduced, back to the original seven years...
period.

[zarf]

garbage. it takes that long or double or triple as a songwriter or novelist to get their work to market.

Copyright for the life of the author plus a certain amount of years is fair.

I get a kick out of how many people believe that they are entitled to "free" use of anothers property.

[Squantos]

7 Year Copyrights were when "everyone" in the world didn't have the distrubition capability the internet provides today IMHO. I think the file swapping is OK for personal use but when one sells for profit that which is copywrited then a problem exists. You have some songs on yer harddrive at home, fine. You collect a million tunes and redistrubute them en masse for personal profit then yer a criminal. Fine line ? Heck yeah it is. But so is driving a car 70mph that will do 130mph when all the speed limits are 75 or lower on Interstate Highways. Go too fast and pay yer fine !

Stay Safe !

[swilhelm73]

52 years is ridiculous...

So then under the old law, the hits of *1951* would just be coming up for the public domain.

It seems to me that unlike books, music and movies should have a much shorter copyright period.

Perhaps something like 5 years for the company and then 5 years for the original artists for the former and 10 and 10 for the latter.

Overall, while the industry does have a point about copyright law and piracy they are perhaps the worst example of an industry running amok.

Everything you've ever heard some leftie whine about capitalism is pretty much true of the movie and music industry - sexual abuse and harrasment, employee exploitation, monopolistic scheming, buying a whole (Democrat) political party, and so on.