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(See ma, I told you I'd tick everybody off!)
Patent vs. Copyright. I must leave this in the discussion. Sorry.
Both are I.P. based upon individual creativity. Different sort of creativity in each case, but creativity nonetheless. One last only 20 years, is expensive to get, and you must make extra payments just to keep in force. The other lasts life + 70 (life + 95 for existing works in the US), costs you nothing to get, and those big, bad corporations keep lobbying governments to make it longer and longer.
Patents aren't evil, (although they've been made too easy to get), and most of the squawking you've read about has been due to companies being actually forced to pay for the I.P. they've been cheerfully stealing....
The underlying problem I was trying to address the idea of forcing copyright back to a rational length. It won't be successful by just demanding a shorter length, because too many corporations have gotten too fat off the current system. I was trying to set up a way to let somebody keep a copyright going, but only at the expense of a higher and higher renewal rate. If Disney wants to keep Fantasia under copyright for another 100 years, well, it would cost them say, 10 million, 20 million, ect. At some point it would revert to the public domain because it's not worth the renewal rate. I think this would be easier to sell politically, because I'm using the politician's greed for more money to buy votes with. I figure this would increase the chance from 0 to .000001 percent....
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