Scott Ingram wrote: > ----- 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. > I can't speak for Gametech, but in some cases its not a bad idea. I can think of worse things that my tax dollars are/have been already spent on. Hell it happens in australia, I even know and own a couple of fantasy book that recieved government funding :) > >>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. > Yeah but don't they keep getting larger? > >>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. > Or an anarchistic one, don't forget the anarchists. Andrew.