Unlimited copyright terms are eroding the basis of society (the Constitution). 5 to 10 years would be reasonable.
I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
Please don't take the sarcasm personally; it was just the best way to illustrate my point.
Understanding the Native Americans from an anthropological point of view indicated the Land owned them. The Land provided food, water, shelter, warmth, entertainment, animals, and other things.
The trade of Manhattan for wampum beads is a perfect example: The European thought he got a killer deal because an island was worth far more than those beads. The Native thought, 'the land will be here after he dies, as he belongs to the land'. The native got a better deal because it wasn't a trade.
Native Americans of all the tribes had a very strong sense of ownership. If that was not the case, the Natives would have not signed treaties indicating that this is "X's territory".
I agree that 5-10 years is probably too short of a period for intellectual property to be protected. Honestly, putting an arbitrary span of time on the duration is a suboptimal way of accomplishing the goals of copyright law. Why not protect an artist’s creation as long as he or she is alive, and then release it into the public domain upon his or her death? One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
So? How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?
Because both of those already existed long before Disney 'reinvented' them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas
and
You can't tell a story about Disney's Pocahontas or Aladdin, true. But you can about your own version of those characters.
Because if you try to tell any of those stories today, you'll have Disney's lawyers knocking on your door (if not the FBI knocking down your door). And don't forget those stories were already old when Walt Disney was a little boy.
I'm not sure why there's such a disparity between patents (which cost thousands of dollars and expire after 20 years), trademarks (which cost thousands of dollars, and have to be actively defended), and copyright (which costs nothing, is automatic, and expires after your grandchildren are dead).
Patents are applications of scientific discoveries. Other people are likely to make the same discoveries and want to apply them in a similar way, and that's legitimate.
Copyright covers things that are purely creations of the author. The author holding a copyright on something doesn't prevent or restrict anyone, except people who want to directly use the copyrighted work, which they wouldn't have come up with anyway (e.g. even if I write a novel about wizards, it would not be Harry Potter).
This isn't about listening to something or reading something. It's about the ability to remix and build upon it.
> I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
It doesn't matter, because most people don't profit from their works after 5 years, if they ever profit from it at all. The current law helps the Disneys and bestselling authors and has little to no effect on small, independent creators. I don't think we should optimize for corporations, I think we should optimize for everyone being able to reproduce, distribute and build upon their culture - with a period of potential financial motivation to kickstart the creation of new cultural artifacts. If you're still living off your work 5 years on, you're probably already rich.
Girl Talk's music is literally illegal because his instrument comes with a license agreement. What if Stratocasters had come with one?
> Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
This makes no sense. At all. Physical property and my culture are not comparable.
Yes, those pirate bay users are all about remixing and building upon stuff... /s
How about inventing something new?
Nonsense. It's still not possible to copyright the idea of a "love story involving two feuding families," or something. You can't copyright ideas.
How many hollywood movies feature extremely similar plots?
IANAL, but I personally have no doubt that Shakespeare would have been sued if today's copyright culture had existed then. He even copied the characters' names (and yes, characters can be covered by copyright), not to mention most of the major plot elements. It wasn't just "Oh, this general idea is kinda similar to that one."
It's the skill of Shakespeare's story telling that made him so great, not the stories themselves. But the stories are protected by copyright, not the skill.
Well, kind of. But when I suggest creating something "new", I'm not saying don't remix/use old ideas, I say don't remix/use actual previous existing artifacts.
And let's be clear here, the Pirate Bay is not about creating, it's about consuming.
And you don't make a remix with an mp3. Seriously, that's just silly. If you're looking to remix music, which is what I'm mostly talking about, you need to separate tracks to manipulate them and it's damn near impossible to separate out the drums from the vocals from the keys, etc. if you're working from any listening format like mp3 and the like. Remix culture my foot.
This kind of statement does not help your case at all.
Pirate Bay is not about remix culture. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Saying that it is just makes every single thing you say on the topic suspect.
I'm not in favor of the kind of restriction we see dicussed in this article. I'm against sopa/pipa/acta style approaches. But I also know that copying music and movies is 99.99% about getting something for free, not about remixing. So please. Be honest here.
Otherwise you just make the other side's arguments more powerful.