On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 08:56:26AM +0700, Tracy R Reed wrote: > I mean *our* lives and there are many things which have been invented > which pretty clearly make your life better. You seem to be under the > impression that I support the idea of copyright. I don't. But if we are > going to have copyright at all (as it seems that we are because I don't > see any way to change the course of that very large ship) we need to at > least work at restricting it to limited periods of time. Long enough for > the author to profit by it, short enough that we all get to enjoy the > fruits of our tax dollars gone towards copyright enforcement in a > reasonable time. I think reasonable means less than 10 years. The vast > majority of projects are quite profitable within 10 years if they are > ever going to be at all. >
I agree. OK, I don't agree with the snipped statement that copyright is inherently bad. We have a long history (going back to England) of no copyright, and it was worse than even the present situation. But the time limits of copyright are absurd right now. I'd like to see a bit more than 10 years, at least for artistic creations (books, movies, music) because sometimes things don't catch on right away (Elmore Leonard, for example, wouldn't have seen a dime on his early novels because people didn't 'get' him at first). I'd also like to suggest that there might be different categories of copyright with different periods. Why should computer programs get the same period as books? Also definite exclusions, like data and code fragments. Finally, software patents are just plain evil, as are use patents, process patents, and medical technique patents. Oh, and anything, SW, device, etc, developed on the public buck should be open source as a matter of law. -- Lan Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux Guy, SCM Specialist 858-354-0616 -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
