Are you now drunk?
Copyrights are cool. We as a people decided we want others to produce stuff, so we’ll give you a monopoly on what is produced so that you can profit from it, make a living, and recoup your investment. But like patents, this agreement with society is not without a cost, and you must eventually pay back the society that protected your works by giving it freely to them.
If you want to leave something to your kids, you can not publish, or you can sell it and give them the proceeds, same as everyone else.
I can’t build a house, sell it, then leave the house I sold to my kids along with the money from selling the house I somehow kept hold of.
This used to be rational. But a corporation wanted to protect its image of a rat and paid off our government.
I don’t think that’s a good analogy. The publishing of the material (i.e. using/deriving income from it) is equal in that analogy to living in the house (using/deriving benefit from it). One can sell the house to someone else, or one can sell the rights to someone else; or one can keep and benefit from them, and then leave them to one’s successors.
Not publishing renders the IP worthless, and prevents you from developing the value of the brand. Not publishing is not an equitable solution.
I don’t see how that addresses the debate. Yes, the system needs improvement, and yes there are bad examples; nobody’s disputing that. No, I don’t believe simply removing it altogether is the correct solution.
What’s wrong with Fair Use again? What’s the point of breaking it?
Why?
Patents need to expire because with physical processes there are often tight constraints on how something can be accomplished. If I come up with a particularly clever way to do something, it might be *impossible *for someone else to come up with a better alternative – at least not without some huge leap forward in technology. So if patents are allowed to persist too long, they really will stifle innovation.
But with copyrights, creating alternate works is easy. You could easily write hundreds of different stories about teenage wizards without violating J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter copyrights. Her ownership of that intellectual property presents no obstacle to the creativity of other writers.
In fact, as long as copyright holders make sure their works continue to be available for purchase, I see no problem with allowing them to retain control indefinitely.
Because those works are a cultural treasure. How many people put Jedi as there religion? Sure its a joke, but it also shows how much people loved those movies. They are a part of our collective identity.
Have you ever visited a fanfic site? Tens of thousands of stories, mostly crap, but still expressions of creativity that exist in a quasi legal state of sufferance by the original authors. Works that just use a framework established by someone else, but because of this, the new creativity can’t be protected or profited on, and often can’t even be distributed, despite the original author being largely uninvolved with the work. Cease and Desist letters are relatively common.
I was helping a bit on an Honor Harrington mod for Homeworld 2 years ago, and we got shut down by a C/D letter because someone owned the license for video games and didn’t want us ‘competing’. We were just some fans of the series of books that wanted to honor it by giving it an adaptation in another medium. 7 years later, no ‘competition’ in sight. :rolleyes:
Art is just like technology. Sure there’s other methods of going about the same business, but there have been many great books, films, songs, etc, that took an original and improved it immensely. Just because someone had an artistic idea doesn’t mean its the best implementation of that idea, or that there can be no other valid interpretations of it, or no additional input into it.