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One of the best fictional depictions of perpetual copyrights is Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants".

The science-fiction author Spider Robinson wrote a short story a while back (it won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story) that dealt with this topic. His argument is essentially that perpetual copyright ends up cutting off future artists at the knees. He recently posted this short story to his website. Here's his introduction and a link to the story:

Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free...or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago--a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational--two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!--in the following story. It won the 1983 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and I hope you'll still find it illuminating today.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants. html

If you want a great intro to Spider Robinson, try starting with Time Travelers Strictly Cash, the hilarious (and poignant) first book in the "Callahan's" series. It's short, fantastic, and has some non-Callahan's short stories.

If you want a great intro to Robert A. Heinlein, try starting with practically any of his dozens of first-rate books published from 1939-73, during which he defined "science fiction", leading a group of prolific writers. There's some good stuff later, but not nearly as reliably inspired or executed.

I'd have to say that either you don't live in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, or you do and haven't met many of the right people. I've met tons of friendly and outgoing people here ( and have lived here practially since birth, so I've met a lot of BC-ians ). But of course, YMMV.

Mabey I'm just biased because on of my all time favorite authors is kind of a local.

Glad to see work is progressing with regard to on orbit repair. That's a capability which will benefit all kinds of future activity in space.

I don't know, though, about a shuttle replacement becoming less likely though. NASA might not come up with a replacement (think National Aerospace Plane, X-33) but teams now competing for the X Prize could very well produce an orbital vehicle down the line.

If a small group can win the X Prize, it will show a better way to pursue space engineering than NASA's dysfunctional bureaucracy. Such a win will lead people to start investing real money in new space technology. It's already known that if we can reduce the cost to orbit from $10K/pound ($20K/kilo) to around $1K/pound ($2K/kilo) lots of opportunities will arise for space based activity. Get that price down to $10/pound (if possible) and you see people like me taking off for orbit to do things like create art. At that lower price we might even see zero gravity dance like that envisioned by Spider and Jeanne Robinson. The possibilities are truly endless.

Today is infinitely better than 1948, when I was born

Hell, yes. Though note that the old conditions you mention in this and another post are faithfully preserved in other parts of the world - the majority, in fact. Disease, famine, slavery, mortality in childbirth, etc. Our technological tools cannot, IMO, be separated from the social environment that develops, produces and distributes them, and I find myself more guarded in my optimism than you. In part this is because of the very recent history of real post-industrial technology; basically the span of your life to date (more on that below).

and 2060 will be so much better than this, superlatives become ineffective.

This we cannot say. Again, the sample of time you're predicting from is short - so short and unprecedented that it's impossible to make a meaningful extrapolation to an even farther point in the future. There has to be a balance, and every positive has a corresponding negative, which is essentially its cost. We're just now arriving at the point where we can understand and reflect on that cost, and we're frankly a little alarmed at ourselves. That's the source of much of the perfectly natural paranoia and pessimism you describe. We're realising our mortality as a technological species, in effect. In the 1950s it seemed that new technology would solve every problem in time. Now we find that many of the solutions have created their own problems. Is it worth it? I refer you again to "Hell, yes". But the best anyone can or should be able to manage these days is that guarded optimism I also mentioned. It's possible that 2060 will be heaven on Earth. It's also possible that this is a Type 13 planet. The only real difference is the caution with which we develop and apply technology.

blockquote> The sky is NOT the limit

Maybe it isn't, but there IS always a limit, and that's what we've only begun to realise. We are finite beings on a vulnerable world, and there is a widely growing and very deeply rooted belief that it's a world we need to get way more in tune with if we know what's good for us (and a corollary uneasiness that we don't, which largely manifests as fear of technology). That's my personal interpretation of Tolkein's fantasy worldview, which ended up as not dissimilar from every natural cosmology before it. We now have a rash of technological tools and we'll always have more on the way, but we need to develop an understanding of how to meld them with the world in a less brutish way. Again I fall back on my guarded optimism - guarded because there's been an almost complete failure to do this until recently, but optimistic because I see an awareness of this fact arising. It may "slow us down" a bit, but that's not a bad thing any more than it's a good thing. There's no schedule to keep.

No one (well, almost) wants a wholesale return to a pretechnological age, but the point of our civil evolution ought to be that we can take the best of nature, history, and technology and combine them in some vaguely harmonious way. Think of it as the Taoist approach to design. I don't know or really give a rat's ass whether that's what Tolkein described or wanted, but it's what I want. I recognise that some technologies simply don't play well with others, and will probably have to go (combustion-powered, individually human-driven SUVs are right out). And I'm not talking about some monstrous Borg future. Just a rational use of technology that capitalises on this AMAZING world without trying to replace it. You co-authored a couple o' books on zero-gravity dance, a combination of some of the most primal and wonderfully inexplicable human drives set in a very technological space. So really I suspect you already know what I'm getting at.

btw speaking of moldy old stuff I've read ;), what was the inspiration for Mucous Moose, the Mucilage Machine? I think I've got the right author. ;)

According to Spider Robinson, MindWipe and MindWrite have been in use for nearly a decade.

DeathKillers must sadly rise above the monkey customs of their lessers.

For light, fun reading: any of the Calahan's books.
I also enjoyed the Lifehouse/Deathkiller/Time Pressure series. An intersting, if optomistic future view.
And finally, Stardancer, co-written with Jeanne Robinson was good for a bit of a mind bending.
Oh, here's his web site

For the people who can't quite manage to read dense legal briefs, there is another great writer who has tried to get our message across, and succeded rather well. Spider Robinson wrote Melancholy Elephants to get the point across to people who don't care. If you know someone who figures that this just doesn't matter to him, and doesn't want to be bored by discussing it, loan him this short story.