Replies

I hate google. (Spelled on purpose in lower case letters)

Uh, no. The “Foundation of Innovation” is PATENTS. Similar to copyright, yes, but totally different in effectiveness.

Goolag is Evil

The search engine that doesn't track you
Help Spread DuckDuckGo!

This depends on the the actual code. Is oracle doing one of those things where they’re trying to claim a copyright on addition or something that anyone would come up with?

How about Gulag?

“Foundation of Innovation”

As if there was no innovation before copyrights or before patents.

Copyright has expanded so far beyond what the framers intended, that I can no longer support it as it stands. The original copyright, which had to actually be filed for was 14 years, with a possible one time renewal of another 14 years. This made the maximum length of time a work could be under copyright was 28 years. You had to actually physically renew the patent to get that time extension. Of course, for works that were generating revenue, you'd do so. If there was no longer an economic value to the work, which was actually the great majority of them, you wouldn't bother to renew, thus allowing the work to enter the public domain after just 14 years.

These days, copyright has been expanded to a regime that required no registration of works, and a term that lasts the life of the author plus 70 years. This is just insane, especially if one looks at the plain text of the Constitution, which is where the issuing of patents and copyright is granted as a power of government.

From Article 1, Section 8: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

Does anyone seriously think that today's massive copyright terms are in any ways compatible with the phrase "limited times"? I certainly do not. The U.S. Copyright terms have generally increased by 20 years every 20 years at the behest of major corporations like Disney and others. In general today, if you're looking at an older work, and are wondering about it's copyright status, and do not want to perform an extensive legal search, the work would have to have been published prior to 1924. This is insane, and the ever-expanding copyright terms have effectively robbed the public domain of an untold number of works over the course of the 20th century.

Yes, I said 'robbed'. The public domain is the natural repository of works, and the framers of the Constitution knew that. Unfortunately, we have legislooters who are easily bought by large corporations to continue to extend terms far beyond anything that could reasonably be seen as a 'limited time'. We, as a society have agreed to grant a temporary monopoly on works in order to encourage their continued production. Who, exactly, is being encouraged 50 years after the author himself has died? This is especially true as the vast majority of works currently under copyright are not actually in print, and are therefore not providing a benefit to anyone. It is a shame that all of these works are nonetheless unavailable to the general public that might have an interest in enjoying or preserving them.

Project Gutenberg currently has over 60,000 of these pre-1924 books available for anyone to download for free on the internet. Those interested in helping to proofread books that have been scanned for publication on Project Gutenberg, can do so in their spare time on the Distributed Proofreaders site. I've done quite a few pages myself, and think it's something worthwhile.