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Judge Posner Muses on Excessively Strong Patent and Copyright Laws
Ars Technica reports on Judge Posner's weblog, and in particular a recent post on the excessive strength of U.S. copyright and patent law: "The problem of excessive patent protection is at present best illustrated by the software industry. This is a progressive, dynamic industry rife with invention. But the
conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industry
are absent. Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams
of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral—most software
inventions are quickly superseded. ... The most serious problem with copyright law is the length of copyright protection, which for most works is now from the creation of the work to 70 years after the author’s death. Apart from the fact that the present value of income received so far in the future is negligible, obtaining copyright licenses on very old works is
difficult because not only is the author in all likelihood dead, but his heirs
or other owners of the copyright may be difficult or even impossible to
identify or find. The copyright term should be shorter."
Reader jedirock pointed to a related article on how the patent situation got so out of hand in the first place.
Finally, a judge with any common sense?
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...your bought representatives don't give a shit
Of course this isn't news to us. The news is that someone in the legal community got the memo.
And not just anyone. RIchard Posner is the most-cited appellate judge in the USA. He's incredibly influential, and most of all on topics relating to law and the economy. To give you an idea, he has almost single-handedly convinced the antitrust bar that there is no such thing as monopoly power, statutes to the contrary, and is spearheading a movement within the legal community to "revise" antitrust law to something closer to what the railroad barons would have recognized.
So, yeah, we can feel smug. But we should also be very glad that this particular pebble is starting to move.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I have long ago given up the hope that any sanity could be restored to copyright in the USA. The Capitol Records vs. Naxos case was unbelievably far reaching, with the court that heard the case ruling basically that every recording ever made in the USA, yes even back to Thomas Edison, was still under copyright. They essentially made up the law in their ruling, but as Naxos was clearly in the wrong (they knowingly violated a valid copyright on an old recording from the 1930s) Naxos didn't want to appeal and spend more money on a case they couldn't win, even though an appeal might have knocked down some of the more insane parts of the original court ruling.
What really gets me is that in this current age of declining government budgets that nobody sees the biggest flaw of the Bono Copyright law - namely that it allows automatic renewal of copyrights for free . I'm not in favor of perpetual copyrights, but as others have argued, at least make the people that want them have to pay for them. If they are so valuable then charge for them. I cannot believe the US government is willingly passing by possible copyright fees by allowing automatic free renewals. At least if renewals cost money, some people would refuse to pay it and some things would fall back into the public domain and those who really consider renewals to be valuable would at least have to pay for it. A sliding scale where the renewal costs began to get more costly over time could also finally cause things to go back into the public domain.
I can see things reaching a stage where nobody really cares about copyright lengths because they'll be too busy making their own stuff.
Not if the likes of Disney manage to convince a judge that people making their own movies with DSLR have infringed copyright in the nonliteral elements of works owned by the likes of Disney, or if people making their own movies with DSLR simply lack the millions of dollars to litigate a competent legal defense.
The only question is how long they'll take to realise it and try to patent "sci-fi".
And that's where nonliteral copying comes into play: attempts to use copyright to claim exclusive rights in the use of a specific set of tropes together, or to use copyright or trademark to claim exclusive rights in adaptations of a given pre-1923 story to film that one of the major studios has already adapted.