Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Perhaps the answer, then is to make corporate copyright last for the lifetime of the company (just as individual copyright lasts for the lifetime of the individual + "X" years). That way, Disney get to keep their Mouse, and the rest of the US gets sensible copyright terms.
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How is that sensible? And what exactly do you mean by the life of the corporation? Is the corporation "dead" if another company buys a controlling interest in shares? What if the company buying the shares maintains the company it bought as a sub? What if it doesn't? What if the company undergoes a complete corporate re-org so it's barely recognizable, but the shareholders haven't changed? What if the company is just a hold company for one individual, and he dissolves the corporation?
Canada's Hudson Bay Company started in 1670, so I'm not sure a copyright term of 342 years+ is really what people think of as a "sensible" copyright term.
The problem with this suggestion (and other copyright maximizing suggestions like it) is that equating copyrightable expressions with physical property is comparing apples to oranges. Tubemonkey seems to think there's an inherent right to your ideas but that's not true; the rights are a fiction created by copyright law, law designed to encourage new ideas while understanding that any new ideas are recombinations of old ideas or incremental changes to same.
If you want to keep your ideas forever, just don't share them, problem solved.