On Sat, 14 Aug 2010 07:06:08 am Rugxulo wrote:
Hi,
On 8/13/10, Frank Heckenbach ih8mj@fjf.gnu.de wrote:
Rugxulo wrote:
You're right, good point, BUT copyright was never meant to be extended indefinitely.
Not indefinitely, but for a long time. Even the minimum terms of the Berne Convention are "almost forever", especially WRT software.
Software is different than movies or books or whatever. It shouldn't have 70+ years of copyright.
Neither should movies or books. The original copyright period in the US was 14 years, and authors could renew it for another 14 years. If I remember the facts correctly, less than 10% of authors took out copyright in the first place, and less than 5% of those bothered to renew. That means that for 95% of all copyrighted works, it wasn't worth filling out a form and paying a small fee in order to get 28 years' of copyright, let alone 70. To put it another way, the value to the author of the work after 14 years was essentially zero.
Copyright law is designed to protect the financial interests of the 0.01% of authors whose works are still valuable after 50 years, not the 90% for whom 10 years would be plenty of protection. I mean, pick up a copy of (say) the New York Times and choose a news article at random. A month after it is published, the financial worth of that article is likely going to be zero. And yet copyright law protects it for 70+ years. Ridiculous.
But we're not discussing what "should be", but what *is*, and the legal reality is that works like P5, even without a copyright notice, *are* copyrighted and will remain so for the foreseeable future. That means that using such a work puts you in legal jeopardy unless you get an explicit licence to use it.
If you, or somebody else, chooses to take that risk, then by all means do so. Just do so with full understanding that you *are* infringing copyright, and even if the author is happy to turn a blind eye, the copyright holder might not be.
As for the rest of the debate... well, it's too long, too rambling, the analogies you make are strange, and none of it really matters. We're not designing our perfect copyright law, nor are we documenting all the crazy things people do. We're trying to help Frank decide what the future of gpc should be.