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Comment by Zimahl | Hacker News Reader

I find it odd that we protect one segment of creatives and not another. Artists get these insane protections yet if you invent something it's up to 24 years and only if you want to spend the time and money getting the protection. What an insane racket.

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Patents and copyright are completely different. Copyright protects a specific work - you could write a book that has exactly the same plot and characters as The Great Gatsby, and as long as you use different sentences and names, it would not be copyright infringement (just look at the cookie-cutter ripoffs of Shades of Grey - and for each one that's published, the editor rejected 30 more).

If you have a patent on some mechanism, nobody else is allowed to use that mechanism without your approval, and minor variations are not sufficient to bypass that.

Your broader point is a good one, but my understanding (though IANAL) is that while copyright does protect the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself, exactly where to draw the line is a bit of a fuzzy area (see "substantial similarity"[1]). It's not just a work exactly as it was expressed - a written work might infringe even with different names and wording. One test that has been proposed is if "the ordinary observer, unless he set out to detect the disparities, would be disposed to overlook them, and regard [the] aesthetic appeal [of the two works] as the same". On the other hand scenes that are required by the genre generally aren't protected even if they're copied pretty closely (according to scène à faire doctrine[2]).

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire

We should be careful about conflating principle and evidence. That looks like an evidential test to help a court decide whether copying had taken place. If you turn up with what looks like a tweaked copy of Harry Potter claiming you wrote it yourself, no-one's going to believe you -- but if you did somehow manage to prove it on the balance of probabilities (e.g. you've lived your whole life in a sealed metal box and can prove you've never read Harry Potter or something), then you're fine, you've rebutted the evidential presumption.

It may be odd, but it is predictable. Patent monopolies are a balance between corporations: Some licensees, some licencors. They spend about equal amounts of money influencing legislation.

Publishers and media consumers have a less balanced relationship. Publishers can spend more to influence legislation. So, in practice, copyright monopolies go on forever.

On the other hand, copyright protects copying but patents cover usage - even if only personally. It's reasonable for patents to have much shorter validity than copyright.

Are you arguing that patents should have as long a lifetime as copyright?? Also what country has a 24 year patent protection?

I'm not saying that at all. I frankly don't think copyright should be more than maybe 30 years. If you can't make money on it by then maybe someone else can.

I don't have much experience with patents but thought I had read that they were 12 and renewable with maintenance for another 12. I guess I was wrong.

> I don't have much experience with patents[...]

Usually a good idea to research your opinions further into the realm of facts before posting, then.

You don't need to brow-beat me over an honest mistake. It's not like I was an order of magnitude off or anything like that. Utility patents are 20 years and design patents are 14.

Fair enough.

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