Queen Anne’s laws are not referenced by the text of any of our laws or Constitution, so they don’t apply to us.
Our laws are our laws, despite what lawmakers “were thinking when they wrote them”.
You’re focusing on Mickey Mouse and corporate Disney, but to the author of little means, they gladly will let Disney corporation have Mickey for 120 years, as long as the author of little means can have copyright to his own works during his own lifetime.
Getting rid of copyrights altogether would do absolutely nothing to change Disney’s perpetual hold on the Mickey Mouse character as a marketing icon of their business, since it is covered under trademark law, and thus is enforceable as long as Disney continues to use and protect their trademark.
Open source is a scam. While open source organizations have the patina of some “everything’s free”, “community”, “non-profit” endeavor...
the patina is merely a cloak for elite financial interests to develop new product companies into a de facto industry standard right from the product’s outset, and exterminate all competition from small software vendors - right from the outset.
This is accomplished quite simply: the “open source” version is developed and put into place first. Any smalltime developer who wants to sell competing software won’t be able to, because they will be competing against the open source product that is distributed free of charge. Everyone will want the “industry standard” “open source” product - and to millions of smaller enterprises and potential personal customers - the fact that it’s free makes it a no-brainer to try to use it if they need or want such a product.
Of course, the open source version will, at the outset, not be up to par for “enterprise”, or large business, customers.
After a few years, the “enterprise” version can be rolled out and sell at “enterprise” prices.
Can the small developer compete with the enterprise version ? Hardly, because corporate sales prospects will mostly just parrot the line that they only want to use “open source” software, even though that same corporate customer is paying bigtime for the enterprise version of the open source product.
A good example of this is github:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
If you look at github’s website - it looks like an open source utopia where there is NO PAYING for anything - anyone and everyone can use github FOR FREE.
You have to poke around a little to find Enterprise github and the enterprise pricing.
And you have to check out the details in that wikipedia article to notice the $100 million private equity investment, etc.
Thank you...I was beginning to think I was the only one who understood the value of protecting one’s investment of time, energy, and creative ideas.
Strawman alert!
Noone here is pushing for the abolition of copyright or patent law. We merely do not support the perpetual copyright that has evolved as a result of us having the best congress money can buy.
No, the Law of Queen Anne isn’t referenced in the Constitution, just the concept found in it of “for a limited term”, but my claim that it is related to the Founders’ intent is validated by the fact the the first copyright law Congress passed with its new Constitutional powers was essentially a copy of the British Law.
My mark-up of the copyright code? It’s too painful to port the html, correct it so it will work in an FR post and actually mark it up.
In brief, shorten copyright terms to 14 years, permitting registered copyrighted works to have their copyright renewed for another 14 by the author or artist. Add some some clarification of fair-use so incidentally quoting a melodic line in a new piece of music doesn’t require payment of royalties (I regard the Australian precedent involving a flute riff on “Waltzing Matilda” in Men at Work’s “Down Under” as an abomination) and craft some analogous provisions for images and phrases.
That sort of copyright was good enough for the Founding Fathers, and modernized to cover sound-recordings, software and the like, should be good enough for any FReeper.
I’m also puzzled as to why you’re going on about “open source”. Did I post anything about open source? Nor do I see what the use or abuse of open source has to do with any of the points at issue here — Leef the Forbes article we are ostensibly discussing doesn’t mention open source software, and I didn’t mention it in my posts.