On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 17:10 -0700, Michael M. Moore wrote: Dear Michael,
I appreciate the education w/r/t copyright history. More after an excerpt: > The U.S. is party to the [1] Berne Convention and was the most > aggressive lobbyist for [2] TRIPS, which stipulates that copyright terms > must extend to a minimum of 50 years after the death of the author and > that computer programs must be regarded as literary works under > copyright law and receive the same terms of protection. > > So any serious effort to reform copyright laws internationally has to > start with the U.S., since it was our government that foisted this crap > on the rest of the world. > > As for hypocrisy, consider that the U.S. refused to recognize copyrights > of non-US citizens until 1891, and only then with [3] caveats. But now > we seek to force all nations, including developing nations, to recognize > ours, for the benefit of big pharma, Microsoft, Hollywood, and what we > in Portland are fond of calling "the creative class." > > That's hypocrisy for you. So I suppose if the US changed its position one more time, that would be flip-flopping.... But in any case, the current position is in support of capitalism, right or wrong. In addition, any change to copyright laws would also change the effect of the GPL, as it is also a copyright (copyleft) license. And a time limit would allow others to bring older GPL code into proprietary software. Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
