===Copyright & Patents
OK… the media, record industry and movie industry have made it a criminal act to copy anything! As if media was some sort of contraband.
Look, I understand that when someone creates something they are entitled to earn a profit. But that does not mean you get to charge “Ad infinitum”.
Currently you get 11-15 years of protection on your work.
I understand the concept that copying something and giving it out for free is preventing the artists from earning money and I agree.
What I do not agree with is, the record companies re-releasing old work in a new format or new packaging in order to restart the clock on copy right protection.
Example: Elvis has been dead for decades. Yet his work is still under copyright protection.
Sherlock Holms was finally ported to public domain… after 11 years? 22 years? try 150 years. Now that is crazy
I also believe that public libraries should operate on a 1 to 1 (meaning they can buy and lend out 1 copy) the first year 1 to 2 the 2nd year etc. After the work is released and after 10 years they can duplicate as many as they see fit.
I believe that the Author should receive full credit for their work but I don’t think it should extend beyond the persons natural life. A persons work should not be subject to protection when the person in question is dead.
Additionally I think the author of the original work should maintain “Author” status in perpetuity. Meaning it stays a crime for people to plagiarize a work. (How hard is it to say “based on” or “homage to”
I know businesses will try and get around this by creating some sort of “Trust” or some sort of LLC and start releasing the original works under a corporate entity.
Which of course is not a person nor alive and therefore there is potentially no end to what a patent or copyright. And for this I would say 11 years from original release.
2 replies on “Political beliefs (Copyright & Patents)”
I think a lot of the issue comes down to making money after the fact on peoples works without actually doing any work yourself.
So, they create trusts and such to retain the rights to whatever art it is and to keep that money.. whatever.
Sometimes there is some reality to my brain that says after that 15 years is up, sorry, its free. No royalties to anyone. But they will find a way around that to make money. And its not the artists making money off of music, its the record companies.
10 cents to the artist when you paid 20 dollars for a CD? Yeah, that stuff is real. They toured to make money, not to share their music.
Everything sadly comes to money, and you can try and game the system and make it or you can try and understand the system and loose it.
I really dislike a lot of royalty laws and copyright laws. You can see the stupidity of it with youtube and other things where people constantly try and make claims killing profits. It’s a weaponized tool now where people will make claims just to stop some person from earning their ad revenue.
If all your views/hits come while it was yellow in review for ad’s, you will see none of that money due to somebody making the claim, they dont retroactively give you the money for the ad’s people watched.
Hell, they didn’t even pay me out when they took away my ability to monetize my ad’s.
To promote the sciences and useful arts…
I do not see how granting a copyright to a non-human person promotes anything. If 15 people wish to say they worked together in a team for this company and developed this thing I have no problems with the patent being split 15 ways and the company can say that as this was developed on paid time we have the rights to use it royalty free and can prevent you from selling it to someone else, but 14 years later, you better find some better way to do that and the old way is now available to anyone.
I’d do the same thing for songs. Possibly grant a separate copyright for a performance of the song so if writes Jailhouse Rock he owns that for 14 years, and can perform it 13 years later and that particular recording has its own 14 years, but a year after that, anyone can perform the song for their own profit.
If you cannot make enough money off your invention during your lifetime there is no purpose for society to let your progeny continue to leach off the work you did a century ago. That promotes nothing but sloth and is contrary to the whole patent process.