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Wasn't the original copyright period in the US something like 14 years (with a possible 14 year renewal)?

Seems like its been more than 28 years since 1973.

No, it wasn't.

However...

As far back as 1790 the "exclusive right to profit" was absolutely part of the protections afforded. To wit:

"the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States, being a citizen or citizens thereof....shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books...."

And you can feel free to look that up right here. If you'd like some precedent, we got that, too - a case going back to the 1800's when a photographer prevailed against a lithographer who lifted his work to the tune of 85,000 copies. And, in fact, due to the expense and complexity of reproducing printed works and distributing them (at that time), it was exactly this sort of abuse copyright (in this country) was meant to prevent - i.e. publishers were obligated to secure license before printing or distributing any author's works.

Feel free to look up others as well - like Mark Twain, Noah Webster, Ben Franklin...

Ben Franklin was a good businessman and PR man. So he is the one known as the inventor, when in fact TJ probably invented at least as many items as Ben Franklin did. Since Ben Franklin was the shrewd businessman-type, and Thomas Jefferson was the always-losing-money-on-every-business-he-tried type (and his businesses were often based on the newest and latest technologies), you'd think Ben would be more likely to come up with patent, trademark, and copyright laws than TJ would.

TJ created the patent system that was the basis for the patent system in place today, even though he disliked the idea of patents in general. He felt that patents could cause there to be an unfair monopolies.

So he never patented any of his inventions.

If I had my druthers I'd make it 15 years renewable once for another 15.

How about the original copyright term of 14 years, renewable once for another 14 years? Imagine that, the Founding Fathers had the right balance from the start!

Given that encryption and similar technologies are classified as armaments, and that there have already been Internet-based attacks in wartime on civilian and military infrastructure ( see Bosnia etc ), then yes, arms have already been taken up by some.

In 18th century America, any yokel could pick up his trusty rifled musket and go fight agin the Gummint (see the Whiskey Rebellion etc).

In 21st century America, any haX0r can pick up her trusty laptop and go fight agin the Gummint.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, just that it's happening.

"Washington himself, in a show of presidential authority, set out at the head of the troops to suppress the uprising."

Well, Thomas Jefferson disagreed with you, and explained why.

...ideas cannot be communicated and shared unless someone creates a physical symbolic representation of that idea: by speaking, writing, singing, painting, etc. That physical representation of the idea can, in fact, be owned.

You don't 'own' soundwaves, or the light bouncing off a screen or a peice of paper, and that's how ideas are communicated. Further, once you've communicated an idea to someone, (a) you haven't lost your copy, and (b) they can't voluntarily forget it. An idea is entirely unlike any kind of physical object that can be owned.

Indeed the Constitution does not describe patents and copyrights in terms of property. It's not a natural, recognized right; they are granted 'to promote the progress of science and the useful arts'.

It's also a fine example to set for other businesses whose livelihood does not depend on milking revenue from the last 2 percent of works created up to 120 years before. If more publishers will take this step to restore the original intent and implementation of the Founding Fathers then this can be used as an argument against extending copyright to Life+100 which looks to be the next milestone on the 'Privatize the Public Domain' moebius strip.

• Fictional man, doing good: no problem.
  
• Real man, doing good: Author may be misrepresenting the truth, but it's positive, so there's few complaints.
  
• Fictional man, doing bad: The audience knows it's all fake, so no harm done.
  
• Real man, doing bad: The author is spreading lies.
  

Copyright is currently being used not just 'to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries'. The founders original term of 14 years plus an opportunity to renew for a 14 year extension would be ample for this purpose especially in today's world of "internet time" and "just-in-time" business practices. Instead long term copyright extensions are currently being used to promote the aggregation of wealth by copyright holders, not inventors, nor authors. Maybe this is not altogether such a bad thing but it is certainly not what the Contitution intended (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) nor what the Copyright Act of 1790 enacted.

Your suggestion seems to be a pragmatic compromise though I personally think the term should return to 14+14 rather than life+10 before royalties to the Public begin, and a Disney lawyer would certainly argue for much longer than even the life+70 or 95 we have now under the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act. However I fear the point at which royalties would begin would keep getting extended and the amount of the royalties would keep being reduced and the application for extensions would be made a trivial process until at some point decades in the future, we would have a situation where almost nothing enters the public domain. Of course that is already happening now so any change in the Public's favor is an improvement. Am I a realist or a cynic?

Other actions taken during the Civil War by the federal government, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts...

IANAH, but IIRC the Alien and Sedition Acts preceded the Civil War by more than 60 years. They were passed into law in 1798, but proved so unpopular that Alexander Hamilton got tossed out of the White House two years later.

Back to today, the courts have ruled many times against things that have a "chilling effect" on free speach. I think tracking people in libraries is clearly chilling, but so was 9/11.

Fourteen years for the copyright, plus the option to renew it for another 14?
Copyright Act of 1790.

Indeed, a patent provides exclusive rights to an expression of an idea, to allow the creator to benefit from the sale of their innovation. This protection is intended to encourage investment in R&D, by ensuring that such work can be profitable.

However, this does not mean that this point should not be argued. Firstly, whether this benefit outweighs the costs of a patent system can be called into question. Patents do serve the function of creating a temporary monopoly; whether doing so for software is desirable or not is not something which should be assumed. (Really, this question could/should be be asked in general for all industries, and has been for a very long time).

I think it is crucial to keep firmly in mind that patents are intended, and created for the exclusive purpose of the betterment of the public good. Patents are justified by claiming, "Without protecting profits, no one would innovate. If we desire innovation, we must protect those who innovate and ensure they can profit from their innovations, so we may all benefit from them. We must have innovation." One might argue that patents and trademarks stifle the free market.

Moreover, this idea of the patent system as a useful and justified mechanism for protecting the innovator, is entire predicated on the granted monolopy being temporary and limited. If, like we have witnessed in the entertainment sector, intellectual property rights are continually extended, the purpose and implementation of patents, copyright and trademarks will be betrayed and the justification of them will become unsupportable.

Your point is accurate, however, I do not think that it supports your conclusion. Patents by design grant monopolies. However, patents can be and are anti-competitive when abused, and may be argued to be anti-competitive in any form. Monopolies cannot be said to be conducive to competition. The limited form of granted monopolies used by the patent system may salvage a type of competitive system. Legitimate arguement for both sides of this debate can be made in a compelling manner. This point is germane to the discussion, and should not be excluded on the basis of the inherently monopolistic nature of patents.

As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.

Naw, that's a stupid idea.

It's a tragedy that places like this must exist. Copyrights are so far from their original intent in the United States, they are almost alughable. Almost.

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

Pinball Wizard sounds (to me) like he was being sarcastic, but he's actually exactly right. They fired first, while attempting to oppress the colonists. We'd have left the Empire peacefully if allowed to do so.

Check out this amazing law passed by our forefathers, the same guys who wrote the Constitution. Not to mention, a number of those guys (such as Jefferson) were slaveholders.

It seems even George Washington had slaves, although this was probably because they were bequeathed to him in someone's will, and it would have been disrespectful to free them right away.

I once thought of making fun of this nonsense by re-establishing the Roman Empire. I mean, Romulus Augustulus wasn't properly deposed, don't you know! Alas, somebody with no sense of humor beat me to it.

Let's get real. It doesn't matter how good your legal theories are (and most of them are pretty awful). Pseudo-entities like Sealand exist in a fantasy world. They can operate only because nobody can be bothered to disestablish them. The very nanonsecond they piss off an established authority, in come the cops and marines, and everybody's looking for a new job. As such, they are absolutely the worst place to put a data haven.

__________________

Wrong!

My opinion isn't wrong, your assessment of it is.
McCain was a pugnacious little bastard, well-known for getting in fistfights, racist slurs, and his bad, bad temper.

In your humble opinion
That guy would have had us at war with China within six months of inauguration. Now, whether or not you think that's a good thing, I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't above torturing a few Chinese to get revenge for his P.O.W. time.
Also, you're humble opinion
And, sure, he's justified. But I don't like to elect mentally unstable presidents - even justified ones.
Another opinion.
As I wrote: I still think McCain (regardless of his actual stand on issues) was far stronger than Bush, Gore and Bradley put together. Hence, he's out in the cold.
He's a man of his own principle. He has a following across party lines, even though he's very conservative. That he embraced an idea radical to his party's current behavior also speaks volumes about character.

Another poster mentioned how exciting the primary season was in New Hampshire, I had to agree. During a couple months I was more interested politics than I had been in ages. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."

IMHO the alleged death of politics revolves around the lack of people to back a leadership which is bold and takes risks. McCain resonated with people because he was bold. Too bad he let himself get mired down by the touchy-feely crowd.


--
Chief Frog Inspector

was founded by puritans and other crazy bastards.

Not quite. That's religious right propeganda you obviously fell right into. This country was founded by primarily deists, and atheists, or something of the sort (ie. NOT christian). All the rest were protestant. Look here.

Puritan. Riiiiight.

Many Christians who think of America as founded upon Christianity usually present the Declaration as "proof." The reason appears obvious: the document mentions God. However, the God in the Declaration does not describe Christianity's God. It describes "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." This nature's view of God agrees with deist philosophy but any attempt to use the Declaration as a support for Christianity will fail for this reason alone.

In fact, the Declaration of independence was a declaration of our final separation from Great Britain. It did not set forth much more than that. The foundation for our government today is the Constitution. It defines the basic laws of the land.

Remember kids.. Belief occludes rational thought!

To all you fundies out there (I suppose there aren't many on /.) The founders of our country were not "born again" Christians but most of them were not as shown here.
I now return you to your complacency.

Maybe if the various branches of government worked together in accordance with the Northwest Ordinance, we wouldn't have this problem:

The governor and judges, or a majority of them, shall adopt and publish in the district such laws of the original States, criminal and civil, as may be necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the district, and report them to Congress from time to time: which laws shall be in force in the district until the organization of the General Assembly therein, unless disapproved of by Congress; but afterwards the Legislature shall have authority to alter them as they shall think fit.

It takes all branches, people. Don't dump it all on the DOJ!

The simple fact is that the first US copyright law established a fourteen-year term, with a single fourteen-year renewal option. Thus, it is quite evident that the Founders considered limited periods of protection sufficient unto the purpose of protecting the right to profit from one's intellectual creations.

So they put a limit on it. That limit was not some compromise between the two ends of the spectrum, it was something they felt would be enforceable.

Surely you do not seriously suggest that the Founders felt themselves incapable of enforcing the law over a twenty-nine-year period.

I recommend L. Ray Patterson's essay on the topic for a historical overview of Anglo-American copyright law.
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While it is a little difficult to read, there are some important ideas in there. My personal favorite, though, occurs when Washington warns the government to cherish the public credit, and only use taxes in times of war. Guess the government hasn't followed that recommendation very carefully!

Here is the unabridged version of Washington's Farewell Address