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The Copyright Fuss Revisited
mpawlo writes "I was going to clean up my apartement, but instead I wrote a piece for Greplaw introducing a framework for the debate on how we should obtain a balance between users and authors where the author has good incentives to innovate, but where society at large is not too restricted due to the author's previous
innovations. I am afraid that I personally have few practical solutions to introduce, but you might find my text useful as a quick introduction to what the copyright fuss is all about and why you should care."
Disney the copyright nut received many of its stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm tales, and so on -- public domain.
We, as a society, decided somewhere along the line that new tellings of old stories is a Good Thing Worth Protection--and so the Telling is covered by copyright, while the Story itself is free for all.
GUI -- microsoft stole from apple stole from xerox. We're probably better off they got away from it. The look and feel thing was novel and shaky from the start. Other models [haledorr.com] are probably superior to copyright.
The ideas used to setup each GUI should not be protected by copyright. The actual form of each one is, but that is (and should be) about it.
Music -- Patent? Trademark? Really? Enforcement of copyright and, lately, interferance with illegal duplication, are the usuall routes.
If I make an innovation in music--for example, by creating a new instrument or band organization--my innovation should not be protected by copyright. Unless I get a patent, anyone should be able to take my innovation and use it in THEIR music.
Each song, and each performance of a song, is a work of art, and therefore justly protected by copyright. But they're not innovations; they're ART!