> > Secret Squirrel declared:
> >
> > > Copyright is a short-lived aberration (60-70 years ?), and
> > > technology is finally dealing with it.
>
> Vin McLellan replied:
>
> > Ummmm. Check out Section 8 of the US Constitution.
> > 1787.
> > <http://caselaw.findlaw.com/data/constitution/articles.html>
>
> Tom Vogt suggested:
>
> anonymous' view is too drastic, but I guess that he's more
> close to home as far as copyright AS A BUSINESS is concerned. I
> don't remember any multinational corporations living entirely on
> (C) in, say, 1928.
Think again.
I'm not sure where anyone is going with this, but any sensible response
to the mix of technology, law, and politics that appears likely to
dramatically recast the idea of copyright -- and has already greatly
extended the lifespan of corporate copyrights -- must start with some
basis in historical reality.
Third parties, in some sense corporate, have been making money of
original works since Guttenberg: newspapers, book publishers, music
publishers, fine-art publishers.
In the 1920s, all over the industrialized world, there were large,
well-established, "third-party" corporate entities which invested in the
the creation, "publication," and distribution of radio broadcasts,
photographs, sound recordings on cylinders and records, even moving
pictures -- although, at least in the US, it often took a few years for
new media to gain full copyright protection.
Only a few decades later, software programs were accepted as
copyrightable IP by the their authors, and/or the firms which paid for
their development.
(Although I think historians will bicker for centuries about whether
software deserved its own class of IP, apart from patent and copyright,
the development of automatic control systems -- say, by 1890, when the
Hollerith punched-card tabulating machine was used in the US censes --
gave software a clear IP heritage. In both the open technical arts, and
"corporate" trade secrets, that heritage went back to the late 18th
Century; the punch-card sequence programs for the Jacquard Loom; Lady
Lovelace's mid-19th Century designs for "weaving algeraic patterns" on
Babbage's Analytical Engine; and thousands of little-known gageteers.)
Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that the beginnings of what
historians call the paleotechnic period (1750-1900), the first stage of
the Industrial Revolution, is typically pegged ten years after the
British Copyright Act of 1740?
The impassioned Rationalists who drafted the British Copyright statute
(and the American Constitutional provision on patent and copyright) all
had a vision of a future in which information, innovative designs, and
stimulating fictions -- created by whoever -- would be pried from the
hands of the Church, the State, and the social elite, and made available
to all.
It was a profoundly democratic vision.
The temporary "property right" inherent in both copyright and patents
was meant, not unreasonably, to provide a righteous return to the
author/inventor/investors -- but central and inherent to the policy was
the concept of the (eventual unencumbered) circulation of creative,
stimulating, and useful ideas in the society at large: the priceless
vision of "public domain."
No one shouldn't be afraid of copyright (or patents, IMNSHO.) I suggest,
however, that we should be very concerned with the steady erosion in the
public claim to eventual free access.
In the US, at least, no copyright held by a corporation has been given
over to the public domain since WWI -- and, Tom's suggestion to the
contrary, there were many of them in corporate hands even then;-)
The original 14 years of copyright protection doubled to 30; then 70
years; then became the life of the copyright holder. Then it became life
plus 30 years; then life plus 70 -- and now (if the copyright holder is a
deathless corporation, instead of a person), it extends for 95 years,
practically in perpetuity.
On top of all that, we have the DMCA. <sigh>
Suerte,
_Vin
