[Trenien]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

That isn't my point of view.

My first postulate is that the concept of property rights is a social construct. Different societies may define it differently, and have different concepts of what may be considered individual property and what rights the property holder is granted over the use of the property.

The second is that copyright can largely be treated as property for the duration of the rights. Property implies ownership and control. Copyrights provide some measure of both over the work they protect for the duration of the copyright.


As I mentioned elsewhere, any human society of necessity evolves rules governing what is acceptable behavior, to insure the smooth functioning of the society. The rules that get written down we call law.

The rules change as the society changes, and new rules get made to cover situations that didn't previously exist. Old rules do tend to stick around, but generally don't matter because they don't get enforced.

If it makes you happier, I'll drop the use of the word "property" from my comments. It's a loaded word and it's getting in the way.

It does. And I feel it's getting in the way much more than you appear to believe. For once, if you confuse both words, you tend to react to changes (or the idea of changes) to one the way you would to changes to the other.

<sigh> I don't believe it's possible to "own" an idea long term. (And I would be dismayed at any attempt to change the legal rules so it was.) RLauzon's point about an idea still being possessed by the original holder even when shared with someone else is correct. If I come up with an idea and tell it to you, I still have it afterward.

What's at issue is control. If I create a copyrighted work, the copyright assigns me control over the use of that work for a defined period.
[...]

Some control. Because if you had complete control, you'd need a thought police ("Hey you! It's the latest Sting song you've sung under the shower this morning. Fork the money over if you don't want to go to jail!"). We're not there, yet.

What is being debated here is how long that control should last.

Why, thank you. As I'm the one who started the thread, I'm aware of that.

Is life+25 years my idea of "short term"? No. I never said it was. I said "shorter term" as in "shorter than the one used now". Is it something I can live with? Yes.

How long do you feel it should be, and why? What is the negative effect on you because it isn't the way you would prefer?

I already answered the first question: I've become an anti-copyright proponent, but in the spirit of compromise, I'd settle for a hard 15-20 years period, or until the death of the author, whichever comes first.

As to the second question. That one will take a bit longer to answer to.

On a personnal level, I'm very offended at the way privacy rights are being slowly destroyed to satisfy the greed of a few copyrights owners. As a linux user, I'm pissed to have to periodically jump through hoops to access content simply because the same bastards want to get a level of control over copyrighted works that has never been intended when the laws were written in the first place ("We'll decide when, where, how, how long and how many time you'll be able to access whatever").
On a more general level, I recognise that no intellectual creation emerges in a vacuum: it always is the result of a bit of creativity mixed with a lot of tinkering of things the author(s) have been exposed to. What the copyright laws as they are have done is to attack the public domain - when the laws were created, a middle age guy such as myself could expect works contemporary to him become public domain before his death. As it is, I'm not even sure anything written in the last 20 years will become public domain before my yet to be born kids death - and that's with current durations!
Ideas - especially when you're talking about stories - are meant to be shared. This is a natural occurence in human society, from the ghost stories told around a campfire to the tape of a movie I handed to someone I knew because I thought it was cool. I could live with long term copyright duration if they officially were of a Creative Common nature; i.e. if they recognized the inherently social nature of sharing. I'm not only talking of p2p here. As it is written, if you have a few friends over to watch a DVD, you're violating copyright as written in the preliminary disclaimer (they're not members of your family).

Right now, these laws are used to slowly rob us of the public domain as it was meant and everything it implies. That is something I'm very vocal against.