Mathematical equations are not copyrightable, and should not be.
Copyright is not for ideas or concepts, which can be expressed in different forms; just the expression.
I appreciate what you’re saying about corporations wanting indefinite copyright.
If you think about it just a moment, the original idea of lifetime of the author plus x years “”””should”””” render that indefinite idea unworkable under the law.
Say your widow sold all her interest in your book to get a big one-time payment of say $5 million from corporation. After the x years is up, the copyright should simply expire.
This also protects such an author, when you think about it, during their lifetime, from such a corporation hiring an operative to murder the author, then start publishing the book themselves. Your estate/heirs would still own the rights. Of course, nothing can protect the author from those heirs ! lol.
“If” the system is applied correctly and not twisted, it’s basically aimed in the right direction.
Here’s a link, if you’d like, take a “yellow marker”, mark it up where you want changes, and we can all debate the changes / suggestions:
http://copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html
Again, this thread is about copyright (please start a new thread if you want to discuss patents, and I’ll chime in that I feel that all patents are by definition unpatentable, if you carefully consider the rules of patentability).
If I develop a software application, copyright protects me from people copying my product and competing against me in selling it.
It does not protect me from other people seeing what I’ve done, writing their own appliction from scratch, that has a different look and feel, but has the same functionality. If the functionality requires the developer to devise a sophisticated algorithm, the competitor needs to figure that out on their own and write it from scratch for their competing software.
Each market participant working on their own is competition; when market participants simply take the executable software of others and sell it as their own, they’ve stolen.
Same rule as if I made a fantastically beautiful sculpture: don’t caste a mold of my work and resell copies - make your own sculpture from scratch - even if it’s the same figure. Then, if you want to mass market your sculpture, have at it. Just don’t mass market my sculpture.
I’m very curious to see your “markup” on those copyright rules.
Yes, yes. I was using that as an example for a reductio ad absurdum of another poster's arguments. We mathematicians don't want them to be copyrightable, since haggling over rights would grind our profession to a halt. The problem is that the rest of culture works more like mathematics works than copyright maximalists want to admit (and if you doubt there really are copyright maximalists who are feeding the "information oligopoly" the Forbes author decries, look at the Fester, other fellow I'm quarreling with on this thread.)
Copyright is not for ideas or concepts, which can be expressed in different forms; just the expression.
I gather then, you, along with me, think that the suit which suppressed publication of The Wind Done Gone at the behest of the estate of Margaret Mitchell was wrongly decided. My main objection to the current state of copyright law is the suppression of derivative works -- though perpetual extension in the face of "for a limited term" and the really obnoxious removal of works from the public domain to retroactively put them under copyright (how does this serve the Constitutional purpose?) are also highly objectionable.
As for lifetime of the author plus x years, that wasn't the original idea. The original idea was 14 years, renewable at the request of the author for 14 years (copyright terms under the Law of Queen Anne).
...make your own sculpture from scratch - even if it’s the same figure...
Really? somehow doesn't work with cartoons of a famous mouse. Your own cartoon from scratch of the same figure still gets you sued by Disney Corp. Write rules for a fantasy RPG describing how one of H.P. Lovecraft's horrors should be simulated by the game-master, get sued by Lovecraft's estate for using the name, even though though doing this is plainly a transformational work (there's no competing RPG rulebook by Lovecraft that's being displaced from the market) and one which will arguably increase demand for the estate's holdings. Different expressions of the same idea, at least in the area of art and literature, are repeatedly suppressed by suits from rightsholders to earlier versions of the same idea, and seemingly some folks here at FR (Fester, this means you) think it should be even more that way than it already is.
Remember, I'm not arguing against copyright, I'm arguing for copyright as the Founders plainly meant it in historical context -- they were plainly thinking of the British Law of Queen Anne as a model for copyright, just as the thought of the Statute on Monopolies as a model for patents -- with robust fair-use allowances and passage into the public domain after "a limited term", since the stated Constitutional purpose of copyrights (and patents) is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
It's late where I am. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have a stab at marking up the current copyright law to give something closer to my ideal. Good night all.