Slashdot Mirror
The Case For Perpetual Copyright
Several readers sent in a link to an op-ed in the NYTimes by novelist Mark Halprin, who lays out the argument for what amounts to perpetual copyright. He says that anything less is essentially an unfair public taking of property: "No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind." This community can surely supply a plethora of arguments for the public domain, words which don't appear in the op-ed. In a similar vein, reader benesch sends us to the BBC for a tale of aging pop performers (virtually) serenading Parliament in favor of extending copyright for recording artists in the UK. Some performers are likely to outlive the current protections, now fixed at a mere 50 years.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
Update: 05/20 22:50 GMT by KD : Podcaster writes to let us know that the copyright reform community is crafting a reply over at Lawrence Lessig's wiki.
...except for secrets. If you tell me something, it is no longer yours. Everything protection beyond that is a deliberate incentive to create, not a right. Prolonging copyright does not provide a bigger incentive. In my opinion, copyright is already extended too long to work as an incentive: If you can milk old stuff without end, why should you create new stuff?
So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start, but lets try:
"Freeing" a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, "The Garden Party," while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
Has this guy heard of the internet? Where anyone can 'publish' for almost no cost.
In exchange for you making your creations public. Society has to benefit, but it was also recognized that without copyright there would be less incentive to work on certain things.
So society promised authors/creators/artist a limited time monopoly as incentive and society gets the benefit of the artwork/creation and later having it in public domain.
Don't forget, having copyright in the first place causes a strain on society. IP is not a natural right. Copyright is a mutually beneficial contract between creators and society. The article's author wants to subvert the contract completely in the favor of one side. In U.S. contract law, for contracts to be valid, both sides have to have had a clear benefit for the contract to be considered valid.
Copyright already has been subverted to the one side so often (copyright extensions) without any clear benefits given for the other side, I would have to start arguing that the contract is not valid anymore. I don't believe anybody is owed rights that place an undue burden on society unless society also benefits in some way. This is not the case here.
If you want your thing protected forever, lock it in a vault, don't let it see the light of day, and don't tell anybody about it. Let it die, along with you eventually.
Strange, in his article Helprin doesn't mention anything about HIM paying royalties to Shakespeare's descendants for his use of the title Winter's Tale for his novel (it is the name of, and a reference to a Shakespeare play). Presumably he should cough up something for the use of a similar plot device too.
No mention either of what he should be paying the descendants of every innovator in printing technology.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
... so-called "intellectual property" already is far more protected than real property.
A few years ago I decided to play devil's advocate in a discussion about copyright and promoted the concept of "permanent copyright" in which the material never passed into the public domain. It was a fascinating thing to try to promote, because quite rapidly it becomes clear that the permanent copyright is simply untenable.
20 years' copyright protection is enough. I'm not an author or an artist, and like most people I get paid for today's work once rather than getting paid over and over and over for the rest of my life. The position that someone should work once and get paid perpetually for doing so is not workable.
Disney and the other corporations will simply buy the public domain. What was once a public resource will be auctioned off to the highest bidder and people will have to pay. Apparently, denying everyone access to something creates economic value (if you ignore the costs to the public). Sound familiar ? I wonder how long until we will have to pay for the privilege of merely existing in a particular space. All of those roads, sidewalks, and parks could be sold off, and we could implant chips in people to debit their bank accounts to the owners of that property. You already pay rent, isn't it just an extension of the same thing ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind
I agree entirely, there is no good reason to put physical limitations on ideas and doing so degrades them. Good ideas can be immortal, a story is retold, a song is sung, inventions are shared and implemented long after the death of the person who conceived the original. As one candle lights another, ideas flow between people and enrich all. A society that would put unreasonable restrictions on these things will extinguish them. The ultimate reward for any author is recognition and imitation.
Perpetual copyrights will be used to crush people with new stories, songs and ideas. "What is yours next to our collection, which [contains tens of thousands | spans the entire history of recorded music | includes the work of Einstein]?" they can ask before dismissing you. Every day we come closer to losing the right to read.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think it's more than just a culture committing suicide; perhaps all of humanity is trying to destroy its own free will in favor of a strict rulebook governing what happens and when.
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" actually infringes upon others' right to think.
Imagine the future. It is clear that some day, maybe soon or maybe distant, we will know how to interface computers directly with the mind. We will quite literally expand our own minds. What is the difference between a book stored in your digital memory and a book stored in someone's birth-given photographic memory? What is the difference between DRM in a computer and DRM in a mind? How can you have preemptive systems that stop the transfer of information without affecting the computers connected to our brains? This is, literally, the path to third-party mind control.
Are we going to have "intellectual" laws that make it illegal to remember something for too long, or too precisely? Will we have laws that make it illegal to communicate something you know? Because, at its base, this is what intellectual property is. It will become more and more evident as humans gain physical control over their own minds.
If we really want to treat copyright as "physical property" then once you sell me a CD/Book/Movie you can't claim you only sold me "limited license". We're dealing with physical thing now, so I can disassemble, sell and re-sell, rent it out, share it with anybody I want.
Because if someone tries to sell you a horse that you can ONLY ride on your lawn you call that person nuts.
Hyperom.com
"So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start"
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs. What if the maker of the house had a perpetual monopoly on building houses? Well, Mr Helprin wouldn't have a problem with the government taking his house when he died; he wouldn't have a house.
Property is the right to own what you make or buy. Monopoly rights is the right to prevent anyone else from making the same (or sufficiently similar) thing. Wether the copy is made by hand, or by machines makes no difference to the essence.
Think about it for a minute. The vast majority of a musician's work is OUTSIDE the recording studio, performing live. It's easy to be cavalier about the fruits of one afternoon in the studio when you can still go out and make a boatload of money touring. (Remember, as recently as the 70's albums were often considered promotional material for live concerts, the real money-makers.)
Compare this to a novelist, who often spends YEARS of his life on a single novel. Can't exactly sell out football stadiums full of fans to watch you carefully develop characters and fine-tune the same passages over a period of months. If a novelist isn't making money from the sales of his novel, he's probably not making money off it, period.
Lets continue the argument of perpetual copyright compared to ownership of physical objects... physical objects become damaged, obsolete and eventually disposed of. Works of art aside, physical objects have very much finite existences.
Also, even if copyrights were perpetual, it is very likely that descendants would eventually get rid or forget about their rights to their ancestors's work.
IMO, life (up to the last living actor/director/writer/etc. involved in a team production) + 25 years should be plenty sufficient... or maybe a flat 100 years from initial publications.
Satire needs to portray a specific position or attitude to be effective. This piece is just highly original rambling. No one else wants perpetual copyrights, least of all the biggest supporters of extensions of copyright, Walt Disney. What would they do if they had to start paying H. C. Andersen's family for their use of The Little Mermaid?
With perpetual copyrights, we would have perpetual heritage disputes (who owns the works of Aristotle these days?), and all important works locked away. This is just stupid.
Greed, however dispicable, is unsurprising.
The copyright is already too long by about 50 years (in the US). I can imagine detailed arguments over the fine details, but 10-20 years is the right range. And corporations should not be allowed to own copyrights, only to license them from the owners for a limited period of time. Also copyrights should die immediately when the owner of the copyright dies. Families don't have any respect for the artistic integrity of the works of authors, so why should they be allowed to control it. (Sometimes I don't like what an author does, and prefer an earlier version of his work, but I respect his right to alter it. I don't respect the grant of that right to the works of dead authors for people who don't bother to read and understand the original. Here I'm thinking of Eric Flint and the incongruous prequels to the Dune series. E.E. Smith, OTOH, did have the right to write "Skylark DuQuesne", however much it mutilated the world of the previous Skylark books.)
I will grant that this will mean that families won't be able to protect the integrity of the works of their ancestors. They don't anyway. They usually don't appear to even understand them. (Christopher Tolkien may understand, but he's not the writer his father was.)
Also, neither Cinderella nor "The Beauty and the Beast" were Walt Disney originals. Finding the original sources, however, has become a challenge. Or try a somewhat tougher one: What were the traditional words and tune to "Geordie" (not the Joan Baez version). The indefinitely extended copyright has caused it to be VERY dangerous to attempt to create music on a traditional basis. Somebody is likely to have copyrighted a part of any variation of it that you can make (which also sounds good). Actually, they're quite likely to have copyrighted the traditional version as their own. Proving this, however, is difficult. A copyright that expires in a reasonable amount of time minimizes this problem (and it's quite reasonable that ressurecting a traditional favorite DOES deserve SOME reward...but not an unending copyright.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Basically, when a an artist creates a song for example, copyright gives them a limited time to commercially exploit their material."
No, they still have unlimited time to 'commercially exploit their material'. The limit is only on the time that the ability is solely theirs.
When the copyright expires on Madonna's stupid Bananas song, she doesn't lose the ability to make money from it. She can still sing in it concerts, sell CDs/MP3s/whatever, and anything else she wants. Others will be able to sell CDs/MP3s of it, but they will still be completely unable to BE her and sing it live in concert.
And for her to stop making money on the CDs requires the assumption that nobody will pay for the official CD. Collectors, fans, and others who simply enjoy the music will continue to buy the original to support the artist.
What removing lengthy copyrights DOES do it remove the bullshit from the system. No more price-gouging for CDs. They can't pay the artist $.07 a song and sell them for $1.30 anymore. They'll have to actually have reasonable rates because someone else WILL sell it for a reasonable rate.
(My apologies to those of you who actually like the Bananas song. All 3 of you.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Besides the numerous reasons why a permanent copyright is completely untenable, counterproductive and idiotic, I'm always curious why some artists think that they deserve to be paid forever for something they did once. Write Happy Birthday? Get paid forever. Yes, yes, it's a nifty little dilly. But why should that piece of work allow someone to sit on his/her fat ass for the rest of their lives? The reason that everybody else works is that physical stuff is either consumed or breaks down. As a result, if you create some bread, you need to make more, and since it is an arduous process, you're actually doing something that has value. Just copying an idea involves very little work and very little cost these days. Not only that, but the original creator generally is not involved in the copy process.
So again - why do some artists think they ought to do work once, then collect checks in perpetuity? I have an answer for that, but I would love to hear from someone who thinks it doesn't involve "cheap lazy selfish narcissistic assholes who don't understand that their work is not nearly as original as they think it is."
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Go ahead and skip paying the property taxes (unless you're a church) and see how long it takes the government to take those away.
If you want to treat "intellectual property" the same as physical property, then let's start with taxing it. Even if it doesn't make a profit for you. If you've released it, it goes into Public Domain unless you keep paying the taxes on it.
I actually believe that this would be the best "middle ground" between the the two sides. 99.999% of the stuff published would NOT be valuable enough to keep paying taxes on, year after year after year. Say $5 per item (single song, single story, single program, etc).
The items that ARE that valuable are so valuable that the owners (not necessarily the original producers of the work) can BUY legislation that extends copyright indefinitely for EVERYTHING. Even the 99.999% of stuff that isn't worth it.
I find this suggestion outrageous. My earliest [technical-professional] articles etc came out in 1980, when I was 30. As things stand now, if I die when I'm 70 (i.e. 2020, the copyright won't expire until 2090, 110 years after they were written! That in itself is preposterous. The original term was 17 years with an optional 17 year extension. I have no problem with that stuff being in the public domain now. the purpose of writing it was to communicate information in the first place. If it's not, why bother? Doh.
I'm inclined to suspect that this is a trial balloon floated by the big publishers & Disney-oids to complete the rape of the pubic domain. How long before things like Shakespeare, the Illiad, the Bible, Darwin's work are auctioned off to big money (in return for big campaign contributions) and stolen from the public. Hey Halprin, if you don't like finite copyright, DON'T PUBLISH! Shove it up your ass, instead. That'll fix us. Who are you, anyway, your stuff seems to be almost invisible to Google. One unrated listing on Amazon. Not the next Shakespeare or Toynbee.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I'm so sorry that he feels he doesn't owe society anything for his "great" works. That without a stable society with culture and intelligence, people wouldn't be buying books or listening to music. Does he gather inspiration for his works of the "spirit and mind" from nothingness? What role does society play in the creative arts?
If you can't stand the thought of society getting something after you are dead, after you so clearly benefited from society. then you are simply an arrogant spoiled human being. Being selfish and having an obsession with ownership are not exactly redeeming qualities.
Profit from your toil while you are alive, then pass that profit on to your children if you wish. But a baker cannot make a loaf of bread and sell it many times over on into many generations. But she can certainly create wealth around baking and establish a business that can sustain her children into old age as long as her children can be smart enough and work hard enough to maintain this means of production.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Not to mention the virtual impossibility of tracking whose property is in whose in perpetuity. Can you imagine the maker of the chair owning the "intellectual property" for chairs forever? Imagine the legal minefield absolutely everything would become if the estate of the guy who made the first chair started suing eachother. Imagine how ingenuity would grind to a halt as everything become wrapped up in the barbed wire of protection.
This is why I'm in favour of the public domain, and in favour of it sooner rather than later. When your idea, or you implementation, or your song, or your algorithm, or your sheet music go into the public domain, it fosters innovation. The short-term monopoly you are given fosters the actual creation, but when it enters the public domain the real innovation hits. Look, for instance, how hiphop artists are sampling old public domain records. Look at code that's free to be changed. The examples are endless.
But at the end of the day the real challenge is not people extending copyright and treating patents like warheads and trademarking the "Apple". The real challenge is, instead, educating the masses why what you create isn't yours naturally. It's ours. It's the way it's always been: what humanity creates belongs to humanity. You can try to stop it, of course. But you'll fail.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" actually infringes upon others' right to think.
But real property infringes on the right to travel freely. I'm not saying I have a right to build a highway through your house. But nobody has a right to control huge swaths of land to restrict access to the other side. For instance the US doesn't not have the right(though they do have the might) to prohibit me from traveling through from Mexico to Canada, by air or land. And they really don't have the right to prohibit me from stopping to take a pee either. Property rights should only serve to protect the person and his/hers effects. And corporations should not in any way be given the same types of property rights as a person. Regardless of what the supreme court said about corporations being people. We should not allow it.
What?
A lot of the comments here presume that the intent of copyright was to provide people the incentive to be creative. Copyright is nothing of the sort. Copyright was intended as a means to prevent monopolies on publication and distribution. Look it up. The presumption has always been that there will always be artists and creativity and that it's not necessary to provide incentives for creativity.
In fact, in light of the original goals of copyright, it's hard to argue that copyright is even necessasry anymore. Thanks to technology, everyone has the means to publish and distribute their works.
Personally, what I'd like to see is not longer copyrights, but shorter ones that may extended for a period through a for-fee registration process. If you really believed copyrights are intended to provide incentive to create, then they ought to expire quickly so that people need to create more often to reap the benefits. In a practical sense, it's quite rare that a copyrighted work yields profit. Of those that do, most realize their commercial value within 10 years.
I'd also like to see copyrights made non-transferrable rights granted to the author(s). "Works for hire" would cease to transfer copyright away from the author, but rather represent a limited-term exclusive license arrangement (for example, a record company would never own an artist's work, they would just receive a limited term exclusive right to marketing and distribution). Group authorship should be treated as each individual as an original author and a licensee of the work (like a work for hire).
Space, unlike information, is limited. There is only so much living space, so many parks (and so much space in them), so many roads and so much parking space. My town actually started taxing parking, you have to buy a parking ticket to park your car on the side of the road in town.
Information always had value. But by limiting its availability, it also gets a price.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why is it fair for artists to have a permanent revenue stream based on their copyrights? If copyright is extended permanently, then every year you should have to pay the architect and builders who constructed your house for their work. You should have to pay the company that built your car a fee for their work on your car. If you've ever bought anything from a fast food restaurant, you guessed it, you should have to pay.
Note too that the artist with the perpetual copyright would in fact need to pay a fee to the manufacturer of the paint he or she used. After all, the work that the paint company went through to create the paint needs to be recognized.
Ex post facto. The copyright wouldn't be retroactive. However: suppose, for sake of argument, that Springer-Verlag owns the copyright to Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem. Wait a hundred years, or a thousand years. Springer-Verlag is long gone, Wiles' bloodline has died out, but the company was bought by a money-grubbing organization who sells copies for thousands of (insert futuristic monetary equivalent of a dollar here). Now, the mathematical community faces a situation similar to Microsoft suing the Linux community over patents. We need to re-prove, without copying, every major mathematical result once "owned" by Springer-Verlag, if we want them to be reasonably attainable.
Perpetual copyrights are today's equivalent to burning down the Library at Alexandria.
In addition, it would be necessary for the entire world to shift toward the same system, and much of the rest of the world have had very bad experiences with dynastic styles of public policies that grant special favors to particular families. You might find that you just can't push this sort of idea through other culture's social filters.
Anyway, the killer argument against it is that in the history of ideas there have been some very powerful and important ones, and it would be too risky for society to allow a single family to control some of these ideas forever. Are you seriously suggesting that the Edison family should still hold the entire motion picture industry in their vice like grip? The Ford family? Disney?
-P
Be my friend.
If I do some work, I get paid for it once and that's that. What's so special about artistic work that means artists should get paid again and again and again for the same bit of work?No, of course not. He has the right to sell the paintings he paints, and his descendants have the right to sell any paintings he didn't sell in his lifetime. Just as an author has a right to sell the stories he writes. Just as a builder has a right to sell the houses he builds. That's all perfectly fair.
However, I don't believe a painter's descendants have a right to demand money every time someone looks at one of his paintings, and I don't believe an author has a right to demand money every time someone reads a story he wrote. They can make money by doing work and then selling it. If they then want to make more money, they can do more work, just like everybody else has to.And they manage to make a living just fine without perpetual copyrights, so what's the problem?Why? What the hell gives a child the right to earn a living from his parents' work? If you want to have a living, you should have to do your own work and earn your money, not sit back and expect money to roll into your pockets because of someone else's hard work. Why should people expect to get money from work they had nothing to do with producing? What's fair about that?
"Perpetual copyright wouldn't necessarily be retroactive. They could apply only to works created after a certain date."
Yes they could, but only at the expense of giving up their claimed "moral high ground"...
Not that I think it is the moral high ground in any case...
all the best,
drew
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biOFnAlXrV8
UFO Potcake Film! Check it out!
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Mr. Halprin may be a brilliant novelist, or he may be a over-hyped hack, but if he gets his wish, he will also be completely forgotten in 100 years. There would be very few 11 year old faces that would light up at the words "The Little Mermaid" if Andersen's copyright hadn't lapsed. Shakespeare wouldn't be considered a one of the great writers of all time if somewhere his work hadn't escaped the bounds of being property of a few people to instead become the property of the world. The Grey Seal is not at all well known, but if it was still under copyright you wouldn't be able to buy a book by Frank L. Packard at all because no publisher would want to spend the money to pay for it. Ideas live in minds, and books eventually take more space than they are worth to booksellers. If a story doesn't become part of the culture it dies.
If you want to keep control of an idea, don't tell anyone about it. Nothing the government can do will keep people from imagining that Harry Potter had one more adventure. Eventually an idea will grow beyond control no matter how strong the copyright laws are.
Insert pithy comment here.
I don't know, would you deny a plumber the right to make money every time you use your faucet or toilet, or would you want to pay an architect every time you opened your door to your house? How about "his" family after he's dead? Anyone can be an artist or writer and there is no certification or even skill required to produce it so why we would treat what would appear to be the least qualified people as though they were better than truly skilled and certified artisans is beyond me.
This seems akin to how our society is obsessed with completely defying natural selection by making sure we warn the idiots and retards of society that it's not wise to bring a plugged-in toaster into the shower with you; it's little more than making it easier for the idiots, whose only valuable contribution to society might be one single work of art, to live a long and comfortable enough life to breed and produce even more idiots. Real artists who want to make money should have to work, like the rest of us, to reap "repeating" benefits and their families can reap them IF the artist was wise enough to invest it for them. If they can't produce enough good art to survive then maybe they're not cut out to be an artist.
What such a thing would encourage would be our entire society to give up any education in hopes of making one single piece of art, visual or auditory, that will actually sell decently so they can live as though they are entitled to a comfortable living because of that single work, making our society even dumber than it already is. What we call an IQ of 80 would soon be our 120.
Think about how stupid the average person is and then realize that half the population is even dumber than that. --George Carlin.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
There are six billion monkeys on this hunk of rock already, and most of them have access to typewriters.
If you don't want to share freely, don't do it at all. You're not a special and unique person, and you have nothing earth shattering to say that would justify participating in a system that restricts access to information and culture based on money for no justifiable reason whatsoever.
If you have so little passion for what you think and so little pride in what you create that you would prefer not to share it with the rest of us unless you are bribed to do so, then I would suggest you go get a job at MacDonalds and spend you free time on the beach working on your tan.
You're just contributing to the ever growing pile of soulless trite commercially driven crap that dulls the mind and obscures the work that has merit anyways. We won't miss you.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
That's a retarded comment. Look how much was *lost* in the dark ages - hundreds of years of torment, torture, slavery, and having to rediscover even the most basic science.
The point is not that we landed on the moon - the point is where would we be in the astronomers of Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, and India had been able to work together since the beginning.
Instead we have entire continents that went to fire and sword as one empire after another fell. With them fell their knowledge, their science, and their arts. Perpetual copyright is tanamount to having the most beautiful spouse in the world... but being unable to touch them or speak to them.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I'm afraid /. and the entire copyright reform movement have fallen for a trap today.
We all know that the current copyright term is too long. An author writes an opinion piece saying that copyright should be perpetual.
And we fall straight into the trap. Instead of arguing that copyright terms should be shortened, now we are arguing that they shouldn't be lengthened.
If we continue down this path, we have already lost.
There are multiple reasons for having a legal structure along the lines of 'copyright'.
If works are purely seen as economic objects, then a permanent copyright serves to make them more 'object-like'. However, as many people point out, there are philosophical problems with treating artistic works in this way: many cost virtually nothing to replicate (which makes the demand/supply curve meaningless unless there is a copyright enforced monopoly); and their value can be lost almost accidentally (because the copyright holder is no longer willing to supply copies for whatever reasons). In a capitalist system, copyright law is highly interventionist, which just demonstrates that the marketing corporations and their supporters are not as laissez-faire as they like to believe.
However, there are other reasons for copyright, such as preserving the attribution of works. Unfortunately this is not the intention of copyright law; so in (for example) the academic world, plagiarism is primarily countered by public opinion rather than legal process. So called 'copyleft' (eg GPL) attempts to subvert the copyright system to force attribution of code (and to break the artificial monopolisation of code); unfortunately copyright is a blunt instrument here (though I applaud the attempt). If this were the prime purpose of copyright, it would be reasonable to argue for indefinite copyright.
Sadly we think primarily in terms of economics rather than in terms of the social value of the copyrighted work. Sometimes copyright works (for example, reference works with only short-term currency), when people will only pay what the work is worth to them, and the income just happens to correlate well with what the work cost to research and produce. But all too often, there is a clash between public interest and corporate economics, and it can only get worse if copyright periods are extended. There are too many cases where either the author receives insufficient recompense for their effort, or the publisher receives too much recompense (for any reasonable definition of 'insufficient' and 'too much'); sometimes even both!
I do not know the solution to this, but I don't think it lies in increasing copyright periods. This will break the clumsy structure altogether. But perhaps that is a good thing...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
14 Years. If it is good enough for patents, it is good enough for copyright.
I think that Mr. Halprin is a strong contender to win the Douglas Feith award for 2007.