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RFC Deadline Looms For "Orphan Works" copy
psychonaut writes "As previously
reported on Slashdot, the US
Copyright Office is currently reviewing the law as it applies to
"orphan works" and "abandonware". The question is how to treat works
(books, films, software, etc.) for which the copyright owner cannot be
found so that permission can be granted to republish or create
derivative works. "The issue is whether orphan works are being
needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination
inhibited. If no one claims the copyright in a work," they write, "it
appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work
would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be."
The Copyright Office has been soliciting
comments from the public since 26 January 2005. Now, as their 25
March deadline draws nearer, the EFF, along with freeculture.org and Public Knowledge, have
teamed up to produce a website,Orphan Works, which gives
some background on the issue and makes it easy to submit comments
directly to the Copyright Office." And while you're at, contribute to the EFF. Good organization.
Why would anyone have a problem with a totally unaffiliated company buying the copyright of a work from a bankrupted company for pennies and then holding that copyrighted content hostage for the next 75 years?
Anyone that has a problem with that is applying too much common sense to the copyright system.
I'm a big tall mofo.
"If no one claims the copyright in a work," they write, "it appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be."
This indicates that the copyright office leans extremely strongly towards copyright interests. Is there any indication that they (the US copyright office) have the same perspective as most of the rest of us re copyright as enforced monopoly etc.?
I'd like to see the laws also fixed on how long it is before works pass into the public domain. The so called disney effect (the extending of copyright periods after authors death, being done just before disney stuff reaches public domain) really needs to be fixed. Someone (and I can't remember his name) did a fantastic conference somewhere on copyright issues. http://free-culture.org/index.html has some great info.
http://www.sandstorming.com
Obviously in todays political environment Money Talks. Is there any interest in the collective pool of technically minded folks from Slashdot starting a Political Action Committee in the sense that we support progressive, technological and scientific issues & candidates with our money and not just our collective angst?
SlashPAC if you will.
It would be a great place for us to consolidate our beliefs (wiki) and put our money where our mouth is to support politics and issues that reiterate our beliefs and values as a community.
It would make calls for help like this easier to answer and give us some strength to lean on.
"Hot grits in every pot & a Beowulf cluster in every basement!"
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Personally I have no problem with "copyright as enforced monopoly", because frankly that was the whole idea with copyright to start with. You give them a temporary "monopoly", in exchange for getting those works from them in the first place.
Thing is, most people only work for money. Yeah, in open source too. Check out the email addresses of contributors to all major components of Linux. Most work _is_ done by people paid to do so, even if they're paid by some OSS company.
So copyright is a way to say "ok, if you do publish a book, here's how we'll allow you to make money out of it."
I see nothing wrong with that. I _am_ willing to buy a good book, or a movie, or a music CD, rather than not have it available at all.
"Why your work should be available for free" demagogue theories are good and fine, but in practice it never works that way: practically _noone_ works for free nowadays. The freeloaders actually get something paid for by someone else, not for free. E.g., everyone who downloaded a SuSE Linux ISO for free, rest assured that SuSE's work was paid for by people like me who bought the boxed distro repeatedly. E.g., everyone who has some free Linux distro installed on ReiserFS, can know that ReiserFS was sponsored by SuSE, so again, it was people like me whose money went into making that.
So, again, I have nothing against copyright as a way for authors to make money. Beats not having those works available in the first place. Maybe it's not the perfect system, but it's the best we have so far.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wouldn't it be wiser to support the EFF who's already working on these things?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
What I find all wrong about copyright, as it is right now, is that it also gives the right to _kill_ a work of art or a program. You can buy the copyright to something for the _sole_ purpose of burying it 6 ft deep. I.e., making sure no more copies of it will be made.
Which was _not_ the purpose of copyright in the first place. The idea was to secure a source of income for those publishing books, _but_ that was only a means to another end: having those books available to society. Using copyright as a way to make them UNavailable, is IMHO contrary to the whole spirit and idea of copyright.
And just for the sake of a wanton comparison with Soviet Russia, I find it stupid that while we all were/are outraged when a dictatorship tries to suppress a book, we all shrug and find it normal when a corporation does the same via copyright. I mean, geesh, Stalin could have just bought the exclusive distribution rights in the USSR of the exact same works, and killed them via copyright, and we'd all suddenly no longer find it abhominable. It would be just normal business. Think about it.
So IMHO the copyright should only last as long as people can still order that book or program or music from you, for no more than the original price (i.e., no "yeah, it's still available, but we'll charge 10,000,000$ for it" scams), and have it delivered within a reasonable time frame. The moment that's no longer possible, the copyright should become public domain.
It would also be a self-regulating kinda thing. It's up to the company in case to decide when it's no longer profitable to keep that stock of old books, just for the 1-2 people per year still ordering it. When they decide it's no longer profitable to play that game, sure, make it public domain. But ffs, don't bury it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was trying to secure rights to stream several movies.. and guess what, for all the MPAA and RIAA's heavy handedness over people not getting rights? I couldn't... couldn't even figure out who to talk to, and no one that I called could do more than refer me to some large outlets that said "We don't do that." So not only are they going after people for electronic distribution of their works, they make it damn near impossible to actually license said works for electronic distribution. silly bastards. To put this in the perspective of the post, I honestly felt that they had "abandoned" the electronic medium, I hope the law says "fire away" to people who can't find licensing channels for works.
meh
Corporate influence will play more part in this than anything the public will ever say about it.
The dispute isn't about whether people are able to make a profit off of their published works. Copyright isn't just about making sure people can make a profit. In fact, the OSS examples show that copyright isn't always necessary to find a revenue stream. The published work can be used as a loss-leader to promote services or hardware sales.
The idea was the provide a temporary monopoly on published work in order to expand what is available in the public domain. The concern was that if the temporary monopoly wasn't available, then no-one would want to publish their works. Thus, the public domain would dry up. This clearly isn't a problem anymore with the Internet. People hapilly publish their works on order to get recognition from others.
The only problem they are trying to address is that copyright was changed in a way that caused it to no longer add to the public domain. You no longer have to register published works for copyright. This can make it very difficult to track down the owner to get permission to re-publish it. Thus we now have a large body of work that no-one is utilizing. It's wasted.
The FSF and EFF don't always go in the realm that slashdot does (or the community wants it to do).
Your idea of politics doesn't jive with anything that exists today. Nothing is black & white. Simply ignoring the power of the community because you may not agree with 100% of it is worse off than taking action you may not always agree with.
The PAC wouldn't have to be funded through the commercial efforts of the site but through contributions and efforts outside of that. Obviously a PAC means much more when its "grass roots" based and i think with the size of the community here that could be a sizeable force - not of just money but people with talent & experience to make a difference (whom are willing to do so)
is only good if
1) The *current* copyright holder is OK
2) You have the OK in writing
PS the idea has been one I have raised may times here in the UK with two governments.
No answer, however, and no change.
Orphan works legislation ... it can be used in 2020 to again increase the length of copyright ownership. The unethical publishers and copyright holders will demand that the 99 year copyright expiration date be further increased because orphan works will be available for the public. I don't know sounds like they'll be given an easy path out.
Plus, how do you know when something is an orphan work? Is it fair that some copyright holders get more "rights" and others dont?
All creators and profitters of new works benefitted from public availability of knowledge, yet it seems some dont wish to give back. Especially with patents, patents are being awarded for 20 years when most of the inventions would have been invented by others within that 20 years. Only a few hundred patents a year should be awarded and the term decreased to 14 years.
It's ridiculous that 100 years ago when it took much longer for a person to profit off a work, that the copyright term was short. But nowadays a person can profit off their work much faster yet they maintain copyright for longer (99 years following death of creator). This 99 years will be extended again by the 2020's no doubt.
No, that is NOT at all what the Supreme Court ruling said. The Supreme Court very carefully stated that their ruling was not about whether 75 years after the death of the copyrighter was a good idea or not but whether it was legal. They ruled that 75 years after the death of the copyright originator did indeed meet the test of being time-limited. Congress could also make copyrights valid for 10,000 years and that would meet the test of being time-limted, unfortunately.
Make it easy to maintain the copyright, such as saying "I am so-and-so and I'm renewing everything I have a copyright on." Add a nominal fee and contact information. Require this every few years, say 5 to 7.
Also make it easy to release a copyright into the public domain before normal expiration.
Hmm, sound like a big database. And searching. Google?
The _only_ people publishing stuff purely for recognition seem to be newbie programmers.
Everyone else is paid for it, even if their work is then included in an OSS project. E.g., OpenOffice is paid for by Sun. So is NetBeans. E.g., Eclipse is mostly IBM's work. E.g., as I've said, check some of the submissions in your average Linux distro. Check out how many of them are paid employees of IBM, Novell, Sun, RedHat, etc.
But let's get back to the actual ones that publish stuff actually written 100% unpaid for, and 100% for recognition. The problem is that invariably they're (1) _only_ the programmers, (2) never polish their work to any degree of usability, and (3) newbies.
1. E.g., one problem most OSS software projects have is the utter lack of usability specialists, good graphics artists, technical writers, etc. Sure, you might find some newbie CS student publishing his newest Pac-Man clone for peer-recognition. You almost _never_ however find also some graphics artist involved to make the graphics, nor someone who could write a good manual, nor more than 1-2 simple levels for their games because good level designers never joined. (E.g., try Pingus someday. Great game engine, but it never got more than the tutorial levels.)
And that also means that other domains would be practically non-existant, because they're not software hacks. E.g., good luck finding someone who'll come over and take professional photos at your wedding, just for fame and recognition. E.g., while every teen dreams of being a famous novelist, I can't remember any good novels that were just posted on the Internet for fame and recognition. E.g., good luck waiting for a good movie to be made purely for fame and recognition: those cost quite a bit to make, even if you don't go for overpaid stars, so everyone will want to recoup their investment one way or another.
2. An invariable problem of projects made purely for fame and recognition, is the lack of polish. And I mean above and beyond the fact that they couldn't find a usability expert that wants to work for free.
See, everyone wants to code great hacks or great algorithms for fame and recognition. "W00t, my clever BitFlipSort works 3 times faster" or "W00t, my clever use of B-trees makes the whole search faster" are things you can (A) brag about, and (B) get done in an afternoon. On the other hand, "I spent 2 months making a good usable GUI for it, and another month writing a good manual" is neither. It's just plain old work and no bragging rights. Not many will do it.
3. They're invariably newbies, and the results are invariably of very limited scope, complexity and quality. Sad to say, I haven't found any professional project that was made purely for fame and glory.
To put it otherwise, yeah, writing a monolythic 0.01 kernel is something a bored hacker might do just for fame and recognition. Turning it into an enterprise multi-platform OS, on the other hand, that involved a helluva lot of paid people.
But even that 0.01 kernel is already something _way_ over the level of usual works made purely for fame and glory. Most of them are barely at the level of "hey, look, I too made a buggy Windows or X calculator."
So to cut an already long story short, I really wouldn't fancy a future where everyone is done just for recognition. I very much prefer being able to go to the shop and buy a good program, than wait for a bored hacker to make a piss-poor approximation of it in his free time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Those opposing any changes have plenty of paid commenters to drown out comment from the rest of us. And even if they didn't, the copyright office doesn't have the authority to change the law; that's up to Congress, and you _know_ who owns them. Spend your effort elsewhere; commenting to the copyright office is about as productive as posting to Slashdot.
The people who post here don't all agree about everything.
PAC's are for people who want to 'get theirs'.
It seems to me that slashdot posters are a lot of people who are able to get their own without having to beg the government.
PAC's are part of what is wrong with government.
Selfish interests are in power in Washington. I wouldn't post here if I thought that there were lawyers or lobbiests getting money from it.
Then, the present value of the copyright is, and will remain, A/i, where i is the interest rate.
Meanwhile, at time t, the present value of the copyright they have already held is A/i * (exp[it] - 1).
So, at some time, it is fair to both the author and public to expire the copyright, because the present value of the copyright (that is being transferred from author to public) is equal to the present value of the copyright that the author has held in the past (that was given to the author by the public). This occurs when t = (ln 2)/i.
Then, the proper term of copyright depends on the interest rate, thusly:
Well, I never said I want it to be unlimited or anything. So we can easily aggree upon that part.
;)
But on the issue of taxes:
<sarcasm type="heavy">
Yes, and _my_ taxes are used to protect your car from burglars and thieves. Hey, I don't own a car, so I shouldn't pay for it. Right?
_My_ taxes are used for government AIDS cure research. Hey, I don't screw everyone in sight, so why the heck should I have to pay for that? Let them just die, I say
_My_ taxes are used to build highways. Maybe even the one you drive on to work. WTF? I always get a flat very near the company, so I don't have to commute. Why the heck should I pay for all those commuters? No, really.
_My_ taxes go into funding the school system. Piss-poor and under-funded as it is. Or to give a tax break to people with kids. Blah. I have no kids. Why should I pay for that? No, really? Did anyone even ask me if I want to subsidize everyone who's too stupid to use a condom? And let them pay out of their own pocket for their kid's schooling.
</sarcasm>
Again, that was sarcasm, if anyone can't tell. I am _not_ really advocating any of that.
I'm sure you probably get the idea already. Yes, society sometimes must use taxes to enforce things that are considered beneficial for society as a _whole_. Yes, there might be people who do not _directly_ get a ROI on their money, but the idea is that on the whole you get more good than bad out of it.
In this case, the whole copyright thing actually costs you _very_ little. Other than the copyright office itself, most other things are handled by lawsuits between companies. Or between companies and individuals.
You might notice, for example, that even the much villified RIAA lawsuits didn't involve the FBI taking the suspects into custody, nor a DA doing a criminal style prosecution. So that part has cost you exactly nothing.
So, well, I hope you'll excuse me if you're not getting much compassion out of me, over the fact that a couple of cents out of your taxes (and mine) go into sponsoring the common good. I do believe that on the whole the benefits far outweight those few cents.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've always wondered why the Constitution's prohibition on ex post facto laws didn't keep Congress from extending the term of already existing copyrights. Can anyone explain to me why it doesn't? I understand that Congress has the power to grant copyrights of any limited duration, as per the recent Supreme Court judgement, but do they Constitutionally have the power to change the duration of an already granted copyright? It seems to me that if they have the power to extend the duration of an already granted copyright, then they also have the power to reduce it. As unlikely as it seems that they would do such a thing, if they did so it would seem to clearly be an ex post facto law - so why is an ex post facto law reducing the duration prohibited but one extending it is not? I am not a lawyer but I figure someone must have challenged one of the extensions on this basis at some point.
No, there should be no concern about copyrights being held by difficult or impossible to find owners, as in, for example, cannot find a contact to get permission to reprint.
Just require documented efforts to contact owner before publishing or using the copyrighted works, require publishing with original copyright notice, and if the owner surfaces and wants money, have an arbitration of percentage of profits to be awarded to owner.
No transfer of copyright, no legal mumbo jumbo, no providing loopholes in the copyright system. There's nothing here except lawyers looking to game the system.
rd
Why allow corporations to own your ideas in the first place? IP should resolve corporate NDAism, not perpetuate it.
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.htm l
USA Constition
Section 8. Clause 8:
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;
How about maintaining a current (2 year expiration if you are unreachable) contact information/address with the copyright office instead?
.. maybe a "you snooze, you lose" approach is better .. actually i would prefer that).
But will this now means the copyright office will have to have a copy of every work ever written from now on? Or maybe just a title and a "originally published with XYZ address under ABC name" should be recorded at the office.
If you reappear, any people that utilized your copyrighted work can continue to do so (don't know how practical this is
There should be a process for notifying the copyright office that you intend to use an orphan work (simple email containing the work should suffice IMHO)
I just sent the following comment:
I strongly support the concept of having works for which the copyright holder cannot be identified fall into the public domain.
It has been suggested that there should be a registry of copyrighted works, along with contact information for the holder. This "orphan works" proposal would permit the free market to form such a registry. Copyright holders would want themselves to be identifiable to retain their copyright, so being registered, by a "copyright registrar" would ensure this identifiability. The system could be similar to that used currently for Internet domain names.
It will remain an orphan until it becomes popular and widely used and then someone will turn up wanting money for something that was only popular because it was free. They should have to pay a fee to the orphan organization for popularizing their work if they do this.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Also, I think if the work is unavailable to someone at a reasonable price and with reasonable terms (no overly bad EULA or DRM stuff), they should be allowed to copy them (e.g. via ftp or P2P networks) as long as the unavailability persists, at least if no profit is derived. It is not strictly necessary to put the work into the public domain as soon as the work becomes unavailable. We can allow the publisher to resume their exclusive right as soon as they publish the work again; in this way copyright won't be accidentally lost forever if the publisher's employees had a one-week strike, and we also have a solution when some work is available to only part of the population (for example, region-coded DVDs).
I don't know about textbooks, but I do have a real-world example in software. I tried to buy a copy of Oracle's Pro*Fortran and they wouldn't sell it to me, because it's "deprecated". I also tried to buy a copy of the game "Sorcerers Get All the Girls" from the original publisher and they refused to sell it to me. Fortunately, in this case I got a decent warez, but if you ever wrote any program in Fortran to access an Oracle data base, and now want to support it, Oracle's official answer to your problem is "Fuck You".
The whole reason that copyrights no longer have to be registered in the US is the Berne convention, which requires that signatory countries may not impose registration requirements on foreign nationals in order to obtain copyright protection.
Since there's no way to acertain without finding the copyright holder whether that person is a foreign national or not, even if we required registration of copyrighted works as a way to get around this, it still would violate the treaty.
About the only solution would be one similar to that cited in Candadian law, where the Copyright Office can determine that a work is orphaned, set a compulsary license fee, and collect it in case the author is ever found. They've granted a whole 125 of these licenses to date.
Which doesn't really solve the problem at all...
I think the Public Domain Expansion Act is almost what you're looking for. It doesn't go quite as far as your suggestion, but it's easier to implement and more likely to become law (odds 10e-6 instead of 10e-100).
Can't it be used to screw up GPL'ed projects and small companies, who can't stand to defend a copyrighted work at justice and look for piracy of their work?
Rethinking email
Besides, isn't there a FSF and EFF for this kind of thing?
Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation are charities. U.S. tax law bars charities from giving nearly the same kind of support to a political party or candidate that a PAC can. For this reason, many advocacy organizations have split into two entities, a PAC and an affiliatied charity that work together. Examples include AARP (a pro-senior-citizen-rights PAC) vs. AARP Foundation (its charity) and NORML (a pro-cannabis-decriminalization PAC) vs. NORML Foundation (its charity). The charity handles everything that tax-exempt organizations may handle, such as educating the public about the issues; the PAC handles the associated political action.
You say that as though they have some obligation to make it easy, or even possible, for you. They don't.
Copyright owners have no direct legal obligation to make their works available (other than a vague, lately unenforceable constitutional promise that copyright law must "promote the Progress of Science"), but they have a moral obligation to do so, or the community will trounce their asses through the use of a tool called the fair use parody. There are ways to tell the public which copyright holders are acting like dicks about their works.
The whole reason that copyrights no longer have to be registered in the US is the Berne convention, which requires that signatory countries may not impose registration requirements on foreign nationals in order to obtain copyright protection.
U.S. copyright law already requires registration before the act of infringement in order for a prevailing copyright owner to collect statutory damages. It can do this because (as I understand it) the Berne Convention does not require party states to provide for statutory damages. This seems to suggest a solution: make any aspects of the copyright monopoly beyond Berne, such as term extensions, circumvention bans, and criminal penalties, require an up-to-date registration of copyright.
They will fight tooth and nail to protect the intellectial property rights of giant corperatiions...note these rights are explicitly limited in the constitution and will fight tooth and nail to take real property rights away from individual land owners and these rights are explictly expressed in the constitution.
Anyways, how does a novel, game, song, painting, bitmap, etc, "promote the Progress of Science"? These are covered by copyright.
In 1780s English, "Science" and "useful Arts" meant "knowledge" and "technology" respectively. Yes, I know it's backwards from the naive interpretation of somebody who has been exposed only to >=1960s English.
If I want to copyright something, and let no-one have a copy at all, then it's my business - it's my property and I don't have to let anyone have it if I don't want to.
I understand the difference between an unpublished work and a published work, but why should a published work that was once widely reproduced and distributed in lawful copies be forced out of print on a whim?
One copyrights one's works to protect his own rights, not other people's.
Despite the name, copyright is not a right; it's a privilege granted by Congress.
The same goes for anything else one owns e.g. house, land, etc. Some things are just not for sale at any price.
Two words: Eminent domain. Besides, law philosophers have found the exclusive right to occupy real estate much closer to natural law than the exclusive right to reproduce an expression.
This issue is IMHO also relevant to computer software. Use of emulators on current computer hardware allows the exact recreation of an archaic computer system's operating environment. The software that was used with said archaic computer systems was copyrighted by companies that sometimes have been "belly-up" for decades.
People who used those computers, or those that take an interest in old computer systems (for instance the 1979 Atari 800) can by using an emulator run software that was released 25 years ago. It's hard to track down the copyright owners to clear the use of this software today (since most of the time the software has been disposed of along with the computer).
Orphan? It's powered by a forsaken child?
In the modern world, with the cost of copying and disseminating a digital work approaching zero, what value do publishers actually add?
:)
I have found out that:
1. Linux from Mandrake is far better than the one from Stallman and Linus (fine tuned, more tools, and those nice disks instead of zillion URLs half of which works).
2. A well printed book is better than one from http://www.lib.ru/, it's nicer, it saves my eyes, and it's just a pleasure to hold it in hands. Oh yeah, and a good book contains little mistakes -- a good editor is expencive to hire!
3. When it comes to music... well... the publisher should probably just sort awailable works. So yeah, when it comes to music you're right -- and don't forget that live shows should be attended, or the musicians die from starvation.
4. Pictures... hm. Let's say a gallery is a publisher, it can keep the pictures from occasional damage for ages! And visiting a real gallery is better than viewing some pictures online.
So, I think that the value publisher adds is proven and I can got back to work
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Because that's the right that the law provides the copyright owner - to give permission (or not) as he sees fit.
Be careful about circular reasoning here, as this article is about research into whether there is a need to change the law. Part of the issue at hand is to what extent the copyright owner should be allowed to make that choice, whether such a choice "promote[s] the Progress of Science".
I guess there is a fine line when a monopoly is involved and everyone is dependant on the supply, but hey we are taking about books, movies and music, etc.
You seem to claim that copyrighted works either are not necessities or are not a monopoly. As for necessity, some form of entertainment is a necessity to preserve sanity. As for monopoly, music is in fact a cartel because of ubiquitous access to published works and the small space of distinct works. When you hear a song on the radio or in a grocery store, you are permanently barred from writing a similar song. There exist only a finite number of distinct melodies in the western musical scale. Therefore, any independent songwriter will likely unwittingly violate a copyright. Does a chilling effect on creating works "promote the Progress of Science"?
"It is relative. Which invention do you think was more important? The automobile or the wheel and axle?"
;)
I didn't mention importance, precisely because it's highly subjective*. I was talking about the RATE of new inventions, the only available objective metric, which is undeniably higher now than at any other time in history.
"The fact that knowledge is incremental by nature means that the later inventions will tend to be more spectacular by accretion of previously known things."
Again, I didn't mention spectacle value, just the rate. And again, the fact that the incremental nature of knowledge (and it's practical application) is healthier than at any other time in history suggests that the existing system isn't all that bad; at least, not bad enough to require some major paradigm shift (or should that be "cultural revolution"?).
"Anyway I think copyright is ok, given reasonable terms."
Trying to soften me up, you silver tongued devil?
"Patents on the other hand can be quite bad, since they prevent someone from selling something they created, just because someone else had the idea first and you didn't know about it. It is totally stupid."
Actually the example you cite demonstrates ignorance of existing products and a lack of research, which IS stupid (why go to the touble of "inventing" something if someone is already selling them 3 for 50 cents? That simply isn't clever). So discounting ignorance and stupidity (which I think don't deserve legal protection, but rather should be punishable by death), I really can't see anything wrong with the basic principle of patents.
But in practice I agree: I think patents should be much more closely scrutinized, that electronic analogs of long established meatspace activities (like Amazon's online shopping patents) should not be allowed, and any software patents that are allowed should have a very limited life reflecting the dynamic nature of computing. And definitely, any patent which is no longer used by it's creator or licensees should automatically expire (say, six months after termination of production or contract rather than a fixed duration). Sleeper patents and IP squatting should be illegal, and I think there should be heavy fines imposed for anyone who aquires a patent solely for the purpose of preventing others using the IP or fails to directly contribute in any substantial way to the development of the technology (I'm looking at you, Darl).
IMO the call to abolish patents (and copyright) is a simplistic, extremist over-reaction to failures in the procedure rather than a rational examination of the underlying philosphy; simple solutions never work for complex situations with more than one point of view.
*I personally consider the automobile more important, since current society is impossible without modern distribution methods. Besides, the wheel is simply the traditional shape; if the ball bearing was invented first, we might have cars that can move in any direction, no wheels, no axles. Society could still exist as is, except parking would be way easier! You see, invention is about lateral thinking...
Blank until