Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
That's nice, but there is no "natural state" that applies to books, films, musical recordings, let alone ebooks.
Or do ebooks grow on trees? How did I not notice that?  |
They do grow on Project Gutenberg....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
And yet, some inventions were in fact closely held and controlled secrets. Few people are taught the ways of the shamans. Quite a few religions had "mysteries" that were only available to the initiated, such as the Eleusinian mysteries or many gnostic (early Christian) sects. No one bothered to write down the recipe for Greek fire. Guilds placed restrictions on who could produce certain goods, and techniques were often tightly managed. The less people who knew how to decode an encrypted message, the better.
|
Which shows the copyright/patent system is better. Of course, niether one of us knows how many military secrets are out there now, even with a copyright/patent system...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Those societies had very low literacy rates, and reproducing content like writings was very costly and time-consuming.
Copyright wasn't necessary until after the *cough* artificial device known as the printing press made it relatively cheap, easy and fast to produce books.
|
And copyright became effectively unenforcable with the growth of cheap computers and cheap massive storage devices. Technology giveth; and technology taketh away...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yes, and they did a great job at it. They turned pagan temples into Christian churches, melted down bronze statues, tore down walls for use as building materials, chopped off the noses of statues to express superiority, tore statues and reliefs out of the temples and sold to foreigners on the open market.... Good example. |
And million dollar liabilities to welfare moms for breaking copyright laws?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Actually, that's not entirely correct. The SCOTUS recently ruled to restore the copyright of works that improperly went into the public domain in the US.
It would also be entirely possible to write the laws such that copyright expires without renewals, but to grant the rights holder a grace period of, say, 5 years after expiration to re-establish the copyright. The reason why we don't have this and so rarely see works returned to copyright is because it's highly impractical, and routine use would create confusion over what is or is not PD.
Further, it's not that the expiration of copyright "restores" copyright to its "natural state." The term "natural" is never cited in the Statute of Anne or the Copyright Clause, and is not cited as a concept in the US Copyright Act.
Public domain is the cessation of legal protection, and that's it. It's a beneficial aspect of our society, but ultimately it's as "natural" as physical property rights or protection against fraud -- which is to say "not at all natural."
|
Y'all are all hung up over a word. I won't use natural, then. How about free? Things go into the P.D., they don't normally come out. I've read the SCROTUM ruling, their legal point was the items never should have been in the public domain in the first place. They were correcting an error. I can live with that.
You just want to pretend that the public domain doesn't exist, so it can't have any legal meaning. Sorry Charlie, but the addition to the public domain is the reason why all copyright/patents have expiring terms in the first place, despite the best efforts of the MPAA/RIAA....