Re: [GD-General] Pro-IP bill passed the house: User-created conte nt providers, beware!

[Bob <ma...@mb...>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Watte" <hp...@mi...>
To: <gam...@li...>
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2008 2:47 PM
Subject: Re: [GD-General] Pro-IP bill passed the house: User-created conte nt providers, beware!


> If you can't sell it, then you don't own it. And it's not property if 
> you don't own it. In fact, if you couldn't at the very least license it, 
> then you couldn't make money off of copyright ownership. Once you allow 
> licenses, then you have to allow perpetual, exclusive licenses with 
> right of sublicense, which is just a name difference from selling.
> 
> The fact that corporations can own original copyright is a convenience, 
> because it allows corporations to not have to track the lifetime of all 
> the creators of each individual work -- something which was next to 
> impossible 50 years ago, and even today, what with databases and 
> whatnot, might still be fraught with risk. The trade-off, for the 
> corporation, is that the 50 years (or whatever the term is) starts 
> ticking on the date of publication. I think that's a reasonable trade-off.


This thread got me interested in reading up on Copyright -- it has been twenty to thirty years since I did so in any studious way, and then I was mostly limited to the school and public libraries. At the time, I believe Copyright in the US was limited to life+20 years. Now, according to Project Gutenberg, it ranges from life+50 to life+70 years, leaving little published since the 1920s in the universal public domain.

So, I've been trolling the 'net and came across this very lawyerly interpretation of Copyright as a "public service."

Now, if this is the popular interpretation -- in short, that Copyright protection only exists only to promote further work from an author -- then perhaps we are already far outside the intent by allowing it's existence beyond the lifetime of the author at all. With the convergence of Copyright with Trademark, Patent, and other, more recent, delineations of IP, this definition doesn't seem to fit -- but I'm no lawyer.

I can only say that this frames my own consideration of the subject differently and I thought it may be of interest to others following this thread.


--bob