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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inventions are quickly superseded.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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Just as must of the nobility live of the income of lands that were granted to them in distant times, corporations like Disney want a perpetual and eternal income Mickey Mouse and other ideas that would have previously gone into the public domain. You can see that 70 years after death has been extended to 120 years after creation, and looking at the trends it is clear that the aim is to keep this moving so nothing enters the public domain again. Should something written by your great great grandfather still give you income?
...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,
Posner is one of the people who has gotten us into this situation. He wrote the opinion In re Aimster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Aimster_Copyright_Litigation which provided a precedent for a fair bit of modern copyright issues on the internet. He's also advocated in the past that linking to copyright violating material should be considered a violation http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2009/06/the-future-of-newspapers--posner.html. Yes, he's right that the problems he identifies in TFA are there, but this is someone who has contributed to associated problems. It almost seems like Posner isn't quite able to say "I was wrong" but I guess we should take what we can get.
He also wrote a good piece back in July:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/why-there-are-too-many-patents-in-america/259725/ ...where he repeats most of the arguments that people use to ask for abolishing software patents, but he stops short and instead muses on a few reforms (that probably wouldn't have much of an effect).
Here's my views on his July piece:
http://news.swpat.org/2012/07/posners-problem/
And there're a few more links about his positions here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Richard_Posner_on_software_patents
Abolition seems like the logical conclusion of his musings. I can't see why he doesn't discuss it.
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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.