Breakfast with a presidential candidate
Dan Jenkins
dan at rastech.com
Wed Jan 7 13:35:39 EST 2004
On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 10:08, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
>>I think copyrights are all well and good -- really! But I
>>think that, eventually, all copyrighted material should enter the public
>>domain.
>>
>>
>
>I agree. And I think that's what was intended by the original laws.
>However, congress is now sliding down the "slippery slope" of
>perpetually extending the expiration period (along with adding more bad
>stuff). It is now unreasonably long - to the point of endangering
>innovation - companies won't need to innovate because they can rely on
>the "old stuff" and the copyright laws to protect them.
>
>
Spider Robinson wrote a story called "Melancholy Elephants" on the
subject of perpetual copyrights about 30 years ago.
(Which can be read here:
http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm)
A quote from the story comes to mind:
"That ended the legal principle that one does not copyright /ideas/ but
/arrangements of words. /The number of word-arrangements is finite, but
the number of /ideas/ is /much /smaller."
This ever increasing copyright and patent does not bolster innovation in
the long term (mayhap not in the short term either), it locks away ideas
- perhaps for our lifetimes. Do we have so many ideas we can squander
them by locking them in a box?
--
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-624-7272
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century
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