You might want to reconsider killing off corporate copyrights. Primarily because it is corporations that typically commercialize copyrighted work. Many authors simply don’t have the ability to get their works out there. Restricting the enforcement of copyrights to “authors” only would result in some rather unusual and complicated results I think. I could imagine all sorts of things happening that would make even h.p. lovecraft shudder.
Regarding the inability to find the authors of copyrighted works, I feel that the only solution might be to go to a required registration system that would automatically place anything not registered with the copyright office into the public domain immediately upon publication. This system would hurt a lot of unwitting authors however as even simple mistakes in such a system would result in loss of rights. However, it would ensure that for any given work, literary or whatever, it would be either registered with the copyright office or in the public domain. Since it would be registered, there would be at least some reasonable expectation that the works could be found and licensed.
The crazy patents you refer to are not the second coming of the dot com era, they are the dot com era. Ecommerce patents are being examined extremely slowly. I recently had a clients patent issued over three and a half years after it was filed.
Software is patentable. You can patent a new language and you can patent new programming techniques. However, IP extends only to the expression of ideas and not to the underlying ideas themselves. Therefore, if you can express the idea in a manner that is sufficiently different from the patented invention, then you can use the idea too. In software, you might want to use the idea of setting up a series of 3D arrays for a particular data storage application, but you’d have to do it using arrays having more or fewer dimensions. Same idea/result, different expression.
Methods and the mechanisms that carry them out are also distinguishable in that the mechanism might be put to different uses than the method in question, and its often the case that the method could be implemented using different mechanisms or no mechanisms at all. Take the example of cutting up a steak. You could use a knife or a sharp rock (mechanisms) to implement the method of reducing a steak to bite size pieces that involves the step of severing the steak a given number of times. You could also use the method without using a sharp implement. You could beat the steak with a bowling ball until it came apart.
cj