Re: Archiving old magazines on website

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

John Burns wrote:

>On Tue, 09 Mar 2004 23:07:27 GMT, Lee Hart wrote:
>
>> Actually, the company I worked for got it. I simplified the story to keep
>it
>
>:( Ain't that allways the way
>
>> > Publish and be damned is an old saying but when it involves copyright
>> > material it usually ends in (the publisher) being damned poor.
>> 
>> It's become a very complicated situation. The original intent of the
>> copyright laws has largely been defeated. We now have descendents of Mark
>> Twain recopyrighting his works, people with copyrights to the "Happy
>> Birthday" song and charging royalties, classic movies like "Casablanca"
>> colorized to make it a 'new work' and re-copyrighted, companies like
>> Microsoft keeping their old copyrights in force so they can *prevent* their
>> distribution to compete with current products, etc. With enough money and
>> lawyers, copyright are effectively immortal.  --
>
>Fair enough but that doesn't mean the law itself is wrong just those who
>abuse
>it for their own intent (holder or pirate). Copyright Law by and large still
>retains its original intent to protect the IP of the originator.

Yes, but...

I can't help but think that if scientists and doctors "protected their IP"
we'd still be using bronze tools (Pat. Pending).  ;-)

The intent of patent and copyright law was to "encourage the useful
and creative arts", and it seems that we have come quite a way from
that when we are protecting the rights of dead artists.

If an artist/creator can invent one thing and retire, how does that
stimulate additional creation?  Doesn't that argue for a shorter
term of control before the idea passes into the public domain,
particularly for fast-moving technology areas, where seven years
is three generations of technology.

I've created a lot of IP, and used a lot of IP, but I'm beginning to
have real doubts about our conventional understanding of IP.

It's a good thing that we are still permitted to "stand on the
shoulders of giants", or we can pretty well pack it in for the
human enterprise.

-michael

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