----- Original Message ----- From: "David Dyer-Bennet" <dd-b at dd-b.net> > "Gametech" <voltronalpha at hotmail.com> writes: > > > Copyright, IP, Patents restrict the rights of the 'whole' for the increase > > of rights for the entity (often a corporation). > > For the purpose of making the work possible in the first place. > You'd lose most of the writers, most of the musicians, and nearly all > of the movie makers if they couldn't make a living at it. Damn straight, although I think Gametech would have you believe that society should feed them. One of these days, Gametech is gonna figure out that society is *him* and his tax dollars. > Setting the term of the legally granted monopoly is always tricky. I > feel that the current copyright terms are grossly excessive. I > thought life + 50 was too long. You can argue for a long time about > what the "right" term for copyright on a book is (and it's not > necessarily the same as the right time for a movie, a song, a > recording of a performance of a song, or any other type of work). Why do you believe life + 50 is excessive? The only reason I can see that being excessive is in an effort to avoid inadvertant plagiarism. I believe Spider Robinson wrote a short story proposing that there were a limited number of pleasant melodies out there and that copyright was crippling human creativity. One such case of inadvertant plagiarism is George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" vs the Chifton's "He's so fine". But even those two songs were only 8 years apart, and I gotta believe that you think 8 years is insufficient protection. > But no point arguing how long it should be until there's some general > agreement that some sort of intellectual property protection is necessary. Perhaps in a communist society... everything would belong to the state anyway... Forget about making enough to move out to Vegas tho. > Do you disagree with the whole concept of *some* kind of mechanism to > let people benefit from the creative work they do? I'm wide open to > discussing different ways to approach the problem, and they could look > *totally* different from what we have now. It could be done without a > concept of property, even, I think. If I read Gametech correctly, he's against any mechanism that would prevent him from using copyrighted works in any manner he sees fit, without compensating the author/creator. -Scott