"owever that is not the case - these shoes will say prominently "Italian designed" or similar, but have in smaller print "Made in China"."
So it's a matter of degrees, what I'm after for this current round of counterfeiting laws is strong origin of goods laws, and the counterfeiting to concentrate on origin of goods. So that the origin of goods is stuck right there on the advert, the top of the box etc.
"There is a huge difference between some advertising that is deceptive about the country of origin & fraudulently claiming one good is another"
You took an extreme case, which would be a fraud + trademark infringement, but that doesn't mean all trademark infringements are as serious as fraud.
Suppose: Memorex buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex. Fred Bloggs buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
1. The person who buys Fred Bloggs stick is being deceived, because it's not Memorex. 2. But then so is the person who buys Memorex because it's really 'Chung Brand'.
Item 1. is already covered by counterfeiting laws. Item 2, currently isn't covered. Nothing forces Memorex to disclose that its selling a rebadged Chung Brand product.
For all the talk brands sell dirt cheap in China, and pretend their trademark violators if you try to import those goods. Levi's used the "dilution of trademark" claim to stop Tesco's importing cheap Levis from abroad, but the goods were genunine Levi's:
I don't think a Cisco card or two on eBay from a seller in Beijing are exactly a big deal personally, and I wonder why you imagined Cisco would register and support routers you bought from China on eBay???
"They're usually lower quality goods along with a fake label. "
We already have counterfeit laws on the books, which is how these goods were seized. I'm suggesting extra protection for brands in the form of protection from false 'country of origin goods' because that's where I think the jobs have gone.
So genuines Italian Shoe makers can use "Made In Italy" while shoe importers or shoe finishers would have to honestly put "Made in China" on their labels. They don't have to compete with brands pretending to be expensive Italian brands while at the same time manufacturing in China.
"If I buy a laptop that has "AMD Sempron 3000+" written on it, I would like to *know* that that's what it is - not an 900MHz Intel Celeron. Similarly, I want the video memory to be whats advertised, etc etc etc."
Agreed, but isn't this the exact same thing:
You're being sold "foo" when in reality it's "foobar".
In my example, "foo" is Italian Made Designer Shoe, and "foobar" is Chinese Made shoe imported into Italy.
In your example, "foo" is an AMD Sempron and "foobar" is an Intel Celeron.
In both cases it's not the method of deception thats important (trademark in one, origin of goods in another), its the deception itself.
What I think they should do is focus on origin of goods laws. That way fake Italian brands gain their protection by leveraging "Geox made in Italy", but in order to do that they have to actually make their brand in Italy! Otherwise they would be "Geox" with big "Made in China" labels stuck all over their adverts & boxes!
Geox BTW is an example brand, that manuafacturs in China, but is based in Italy and tells different stories to each side. For example they tell the Chinese this story:
"With a history of more than 300 years, the Geox company ranks first in Europe and eighth in the world in terms of its sales."
"Italy Winner: Mario Moretti Polegato, President Company: Geox International S.r.L.S.p.A. Description: In seven years, Geox has become the leader in the Italian shoes market. Founded in the early 90's, Geox designs, manufactures, and markets a rubber soled shoe, allowing the foot to breathe. Geox is now the world leader in the casual shoe segment. "
"create a look which cannot be functionally duplicated by someone making 500 pieces a day"
If brand work for companies, then why not for countries? Isn't French cheese worth paying more for, because they don't sell French reprocessed Cheddar! Isn't Italian hand made shoes better because Italy doesn't make crappy cheap shoes so you're less likely to get a crappy cheap shoe if you buy Italian!
"Made in Italy" has value just like any other brand. The problem is they don't protect that brand, they protect this fake brand companies, that set up in Italy to gain some of the Italian kudos.
"In October 2004, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Anchorage, Alaska, seized 20,000 suspected fake Memorex USB memory key thumb drives from Asia."
Do Memorex even make USB drives, or do they simply buy them in from Asian and stick their badge on them?
"Miami officials seized 900 allegedly phony laptops valued at $700,000. "Maybe it's a laptop, an MP3 player, or a component like a DVD drive--anything in the digital world can be counterfeited," says Therese Randazzo, a U.S. Customs Service counterfeiting expert.'"
I bet they were *real* laptops and *real* mp3 players, the only difference was the label. What you're saying is they can fake *labels*. But that's just because the USA has become a fake brand country, companies license a brand like Polaroid or Caterpillar, buy in cheap Asian crap, stick a "Polaroid" badge on it and charge loads more money because people think they're buying American.
Who cares if those fake brands get pirated, since its the difference between an overprice Asian product and a cheap Asian product, it's still jobs in Asia.
They should tackle false origin of goods labelling instead, since that's the cause of jobs being lost in USA and Europe. How can an Italian shoe maker compete with companies which appear to be Italian luxury show makers, but are just fake Asian brands with some minor finishing in Italy?
"Say I come up with a great tech idea that could make a lot of money. What is to prevent a certain company in Redmond, WA from taking my idea and squeezing me out of the marketplace? At least with the patent, I have legal recourse. Even if I don't have enough money to litigate myself, I have leverage to offer contingency fees, etc."
Nothing, but then you open a coffee shop in the high street, a major StarBucks opens next door, what is to stop them driving you out of the market? Welcome to the world, competition is a good thing. Come up with the next idea and try harder next time to get market traction before the competitors enters, e.g. like Skype, eBay, Google...
The patent is to cover the case where the first entrant into a market pays a high cost that isn't faced by the later copiers, and has insufficient time to recoup that cost, and revealing the product reveals the secrets inside (like a steam engine for example). It's not because you have some moral right to a monopoly on your idea.
Bear in mind in software, they are not copying, they are reinventing, because the software doesn't reveal the algorithms inside in any easy manner.
"In a world without patents, I expect that most innovation would take place within large companies, ". Why? The big guys can lock you out of even entering the market using patents. Look at how Ericcson locked out Sendo using 11000 GSM patents.
"These "Trolls" are simply reallocating the risk associated with introducing a new invention to the market."
But a patent troll doesn't make the *thing*, he just makes the patent. The only risk he has is the patent fee. The last thing any of them want to do is risk the cost of actually making something, at best because then you can see their invention and its no longer vague lawyer words in a document. At worst because the invention can't work.
"promote the progress of science and useful arts." Only if patent writing is an art.
"And if you want your NDA to contain language that gave you the same protection as a patent, then why not go the whole way?"
1. You license the patent to the company via a contract, so the whole way *is* the contract/NDA. 2. You have the NDA *now*, you only *may* have the patent *later*. 3. To patent you have to reveal the secret, not just to the company you want to license to, but all its competitors and foreign competitors too that aren't subject to the limits of the patent in your own country. NDA is better because you only reveal secrets to the interest VC buyer. Limits leakage. 4. In the case of software, even companies subject to the patent may use your algo and you would never know because its not clear from the output of a search engine the algos its using. If it was, we'd have Google new algos sussed by now. 5. Because the patent office issues patents like toilet paper, there may be hundreds of trolls waiting to pounce if they think they can claim infringement by your new algo. By patenting you are giving them the basis for their patent troll.
"Without them it would be nearly impossible for an independent inventor to get a product to market: either everything about your product would have to be secret (giving you a credibility problem), or you would risk that your product ideas would be stolen whenever you gave a sales pitch."
One word: NDA. Give your sales pitch under an NDA. Better still, if its software you can just show the effects of the software without revealing the secret magic inside.
Example, I'm writing a page ranking algo now. I think I have a better way to rank pages. I will explain on my blog the values it would assign to pages compared to Google PR. But I won't explain the algo because I want to use it. Either I'm a genius or an idiot, but you can tell that from the numbers the algo generates, without the need to explain how I do it.
Yes, it was for a headphone real, but he starts out by describing a personal stereo in his claims. Which is where his claim to inventing the Walkman comes from.
"1. Speakerless. This yielded a smaller, lighter, less fragile, and lower power package." "2. Good quality stereo playback. " "While one might make a case for obviousness, I don't think that any of the earlier players that I'm aware of would reasonably qualify as prior art,"
I don't think we're disagreeing, I simply think he patented a smaller cassette deck and claims it as an invention.
1965 The Cassette Recorder C 100 is the first cassette tape recorder made by Grundig. Recording takes place with the DC International System, on cassettes with the dimensions 120 x 77 x 12 mm.
1967 The CC Compact Cassette is introduced and can be listened to with the Cassette Tape Recorder C 200.
1974: The portable Radio Recorder C 6000 Automatic is a best-seller. Over 710,000 units are sold.
He filed a patent in 1977 for fucks sake. Tape recorders already came in stereo, they already had headphones, they already were getting smaller, my dad had a phillips one with a battery pack and a carrying strap.
"In 1975, Superscope's product line included: eight portable tape recorders, six portable-cassette radio products, seven Hi Fi receivers, two tuners, three amplifiers, five stereo tape decks, six speaker models, five compact music systems, eight microphones "
Not strictly true, you have to do *ranking* on your own. Reading the docs it does let you reduce the document set, just not rank the finished result set. So you can filter the result set down to the matching documents, but which is the most important? Your algo decides.
Google and Yahoo give you finished results but only ones ranked by their own algorithms and then only the first 1000 result. Even then it's only 5000 query max for Yahoo and 1000 max for Google. Pretty feeble, I've used Yahoo Image API on a play site and maxed it out just from random blog traffic.
I guess giving patents to everyone for everything, lengthening copyright to forever and a day, and criminalizing minor infringements didn't work. Which is funny given that the proponents of this IP regime argue that this is what the USA can make money selling.
Now if only the EU isn't so dumb as to fall for the same rubbish....
"The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years," said Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference."
Just book printers wanting protection. This is a big chance for writers, authors, even news agencies etc. They can all bypass the publishers and publish themselves. Before without a publisher they could print the book at a vanity printers, but couldn't get the distribution and so couldn't get into shops.
What use are book printers in a world without printed books? None at all.
"The net result is that a piece of music which Vaughan Williams wrote for the greater glory of God was not sung because of the copyright laws, and the excessive copyright terms. He couldn't have guarded against this - the term was life+20 at the time of his death."
I don't think thats the real problem with over-long copyrights. I think the problem is that the copyright holder has no incentive to invest in new works because they can milk the old works. Which is a pisser if you're todays "Vaughan Williams" since there's little incentive for companies to promote your works.
Perhaps the solution is for works to go into crown copyright after 20 years, so future earnings from works go to the tax man rather than the company promoting them. That would both encourage companies to invest in new works, and at the same time permitting the work be available for re-use by others.
"because it would break DNS horribly. it requires a single group of centalized servers be looked at to resolve any domain name rather than just to resolve a new TLD."
So you expand the cluster of root servers to fit demand, you don't query the root servers now, you query only a mirror. Think about it for a second, you type in "getfirefox" now, your browser tries the DNS, finds it doesn't exist, tries www. finds it doesn't exist, tries ****.com finds it doesn't exist, then queries Google. Google handles it as minor traffic, so the DNS would do likewise.
Slashdot Mirror
"owever that is not the case - these shoes will say prominently "Italian designed" or similar, but have in smaller print "Made in China"."
So it's a matter of degrees, what I'm after for this current round of counterfeiting laws is strong origin of goods laws, and the counterfeiting to concentrate on origin of goods. So that the origin of goods is stuck right there on the advert, the top of the box etc.
"There is a huge difference between some advertising that is deceptive about the country of origin & fraudulently claiming one good is another"
You took an extreme case, which would be a fraud + trademark infringement, but that doesn't mean all trademark infringements are as serious as fraud.
Suppose:
Memorex buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
Fred Bloggs buys Beijing 'Chung Brand' USB stick and sells it labelled as made by Memorex.
1. The person who buys Fred Bloggs stick is being deceived, because it's not Memorex.
2. But then so is the person who buys Memorex because it's really 'Chung Brand'.
Item 1. is already covered by counterfeiting laws. Item 2, currently isn't covered. Nothing forces Memorex to disclose that its selling a rebadged Chung Brand product.
For all the talk brands sell dirt cheap in China, and pretend their trademark violators if you try to import those goods. Levi's used the "dilution of trademark" claim to stop Tesco's importing cheap Levis from abroad, but the goods were genunine Levi's:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1261060.stm
I don't think a Cisco card or two on eBay from a seller in Beijing are exactly a big deal personally, and I wonder why you imagined Cisco would register and support routers you bought from China on eBay???
"They're usually lower quality goods along with a fake label. "
We already have counterfeit laws on the books, which is how these goods were seized.
I'm suggesting extra protection for brands in the form of protection from false 'country of origin goods' because that's where I think the jobs have gone.
So genuines Italian Shoe makers can use "Made In Italy" while shoe importers or shoe finishers would have to honestly put "Made in China" on their labels. They don't have to compete with brands pretending to be expensive Italian brands while at the same time manufacturing in China.
"If I buy a laptop that has "AMD Sempron 3000+" written on it, I would like to *know* that that's what it is - not an 900MHz Intel Celeron. Similarly, I want the video memory to be whats advertised, etc etc etc."
1 8/content_383303.htm
l /EGC_-_Events_-_WEoY_-_2003_Participants
Agreed, but isn't this the exact same thing:
You're being sold "foo" when in reality it's "foobar".
In my example, "foo" is Italian Made Designer Shoe, and "foobar" is Chinese Made shoe imported into Italy.
In your example, "foo" is an AMD Sempron and "foobar" is an Intel Celeron.
In both cases it's not the method of deception thats important (trademark in one, origin of goods in another), its the deception itself.
What I think they should do is focus on origin of goods laws. That way fake Italian brands gain their protection by leveraging "Geox made in Italy", but in order to do that they have to actually make their brand in Italy! Otherwise they would be "Geox" with big "Made in China" labels stuck all over their adverts & boxes!
Geox BTW is an example brand, that manuafacturs in China, but is based in Italy and tells different stories to each side. For example they tell the Chinese this story:
"With a history of more than 300 years, the Geox company ranks first in Europe and eighth in the world in terms of its sales."
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-10/
Which is bollocs because Geox is a fake brand created in the early 90's:
http://www.ey.com/GLOBAL/content.nsf/Internationa
"Italy
Winner: Mario Moretti Polegato, President
Company: Geox International S.r.L.S.p.A.
Description: In seven years, Geox has become the leader in the Italian shoes market. Founded in the early 90's, Geox designs, manufactures, and markets a rubber soled shoe, allowing the foot to breathe. Geox is now the world leader in the casual shoe segment. "
"create a look which cannot be functionally duplicated by someone making 500 pieces a day"
If brand work for companies, then why not for countries? Isn't French cheese worth paying more for, because they don't sell French reprocessed Cheddar!
Isn't Italian hand made shoes better because Italy doesn't make crappy cheap shoes so you're less likely to get a crappy cheap shoe if you buy Italian!
"Made in Italy" has value just like any other brand. The problem is they don't protect that brand, they protect this fake brand companies, that set up in Italy to gain some of the Italian kudos.
"In October 2004, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Anchorage, Alaska, seized 20,000 suspected fake Memorex USB memory key thumb drives from Asia."
Do Memorex even make USB drives, or do they simply buy them in from Asian and stick their badge on them?
"Miami officials seized 900 allegedly phony laptops valued at $700,000. "Maybe it's a laptop, an MP3 player, or a component like a DVD drive--anything in the digital world can be counterfeited," says Therese Randazzo, a U.S. Customs Service counterfeiting expert.'"
I bet they were *real* laptops and *real* mp3 players, the only difference was the label. What you're saying is they can fake *labels*. But that's just because the USA has become a fake brand country, companies license a brand like Polaroid or Caterpillar, buy in cheap Asian crap, stick a "Polaroid" badge on it and charge loads more money because people think they're buying American.
Who cares if those fake brands get pirated, since its the difference between an overprice Asian product and a cheap Asian product, it's still jobs in Asia.
They should tackle false origin of goods labelling instead, since that's the cause of jobs being lost in USA and Europe. How can an Italian shoe maker compete with companies which appear to be Italian luxury show makers, but are just fake Asian brands with some minor finishing in Italy?
"Say I come up with a great tech idea that could make a lot of money. What is to prevent a certain company in Redmond, WA from taking my idea and squeezing me out of the marketplace? At least with the patent, I have legal recourse. Even if I don't have enough money to litigate myself, I have leverage to offer contingency fees, etc."
Nothing, but then you open a coffee shop in the high street, a major StarBucks opens next door, what is to stop them driving you out of the market? Welcome to the world, competition is a good thing. Come up with the next idea and try harder next time to get market traction before the competitors enters, e.g. like Skype, eBay, Google...
The patent is to cover the case where the first entrant into a market pays a high cost that isn't faced by the later copiers, and has insufficient time to recoup that cost, and revealing the product reveals the secrets inside (like a steam engine for example). It's not because you have some moral right to a monopoly on your idea.
Bear in mind in software, they are not copying, they are reinventing, because the software doesn't reveal the algorithms inside in any easy manner.
"In a world without patents, I expect that most innovation would take place within large companies, ".
Why? The big guys can lock you out of even entering the market using patents. Look at how Ericcson locked out Sendo using 11000 GSM patents.
"These "Trolls" are simply reallocating the risk associated with introducing a new invention to the market."
But a patent troll doesn't make the *thing*, he just makes the patent. The only risk he has is the patent fee. The last thing any of them want to do is risk the cost of actually making something, at best because then you can see their invention and its no longer vague lawyer words in a document. At worst because the invention can't work.
"promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Only if patent writing is an art.
"And if you want your NDA to contain language that gave you the same protection as a patent, then why not go the whole way?"
1. You license the patent to the company via a contract, so the whole way *is* the contract/NDA.
2. You have the NDA *now*, you only *may* have the patent *later*.
3. To patent you have to reveal the secret, not just to the company you want to license to, but all its competitors and foreign competitors too that aren't subject to the limits of the patent in your own country. NDA is better because you only reveal secrets to the interest VC buyer. Limits leakage.
4. In the case of software, even companies subject to the patent may use your algo and you would never know because its not clear from the output of a search engine the algos its using. If it was, we'd have Google new algos sussed by now.
5. Because the patent office issues patents like toilet paper, there may be hundreds of trolls waiting to pounce if they think they can claim infringement by your new algo. By patenting you are giving them the basis for their patent troll.
"Without them it would be nearly impossible for an independent inventor to get a product to market: either everything about your product would have to be secret (giving you a credibility problem), or you would risk that your product ideas would be stolen whenever you gave a sales pitch."
One word: NDA. Give your sales pitch under an NDA. Better still, if its software you can just show the effects of the software without revealing the secret magic inside.
Example, I'm writing a page ranking algo now. I think I have a better way to rank pages. I will explain on my blog the values it would assign to pages compared to Google PR. But I won't explain the algo because I want to use it. Either I'm a genius or an idiot, but you can tell that from the numbers the algo generates, without the need to explain how I do it.
"Okay, now give me something lighter. 21.2 oz (>1.3 lbs) vs. ~ 1 lb. And cheaper. And with stereo."
j pg
Except thats not what he invented, this is what he invented:
http://www.nigeljohnstone.com/images/stereo-belt.
(From his patent).
"But all inventions have always been obvious - once somebody finally came up with them."
o l_inventions.html
You might like to look at what he invented before you say that:
http://www.nigeljohnstone.com/archives/2005/12/co
"actually a precursor to the ghettoblaster." :-)
5 0.jpg
If you want something smaller, take a look at this one, according to the page its the first cassette recorder to go to the moon (unverified):
http://www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/sony/picts/TC-
http://www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/sony/
Yes, it was for a headphone real, but he starts out by describing a personal stereo in his claims. Which is where his claim to inventing the Walkman comes from.
h tml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l= 50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=5201003.WKU.&OS=PN/5201003&RS=PN/ 5201003a geNum=2&IDKey=31D572A631C0&HomeUrl=http://patft.us pto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm %2526Sect1=PTO1%2526Sect2=HITOFF%2526p=1%2526r=1%2 526l=50%2526f=G%2526d=PALL%2526s1=5201003.WKU.%252 6OS=PN/5201003%2526RS=PN/5201003
Check out the pictures of his invention.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/neta
http://patimg1.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=US005201003&P
"1. Speakerless. This yielded a smaller, lighter, less fragile, and lower power package."
1 6a.jpg
t ml
"2. Good quality stereo playback. "
"While one might make a case for obviousness, I don't think that any of the earlier players that I'm aware of would reasonably qualify as prior art,"
I don't think we're disagreeing, I simply think he patented a smaller cassette deck and claims it as an invention.
Bear in mind the transistor radio already existed since the 1950's:
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/images/860
The one at the front ONLY HAS AN EARPIECE, it doesn't have a speaker it was later that speakers became small enough to put one in.
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/recording/tape4.h
And that the Compact Cassette (1965 Philips) was invented to make smaller players in Stereo.
http://www.grundig.com/index.php?id=250
1965 The Cassette Recorder C 100 is the first cassette tape recorder made by Grundig. Recording takes place with the DC International System, on cassettes with the dimensions 120 x 77 x 12 mm.
1967 The CC Compact Cassette is introduced and can be listened to with the Cassette Tape Recorder C 200.
1974: The portable Radio Recorder C 6000 Automatic is a best-seller. Over 710,000 units are sold.
He filed for his patent in 1977.
He filed a patent in 1977 for fucks sake. Tape recorders already came in stereo, they already had headphones, they already were getting smaller, my dad had a phillips one with a battery pack and a carrying strap.
t ory/superscopehistory.shtml
So what was his invention? What??
Similar in style to the tape recorder on this page:
http://www.superscopetechnologies.com/company/his
"In 1975, Superscope's product line included: eight portable tape recorders, six portable-cassette radio products, seven Hi Fi receivers, two tuners, three amplifiers, five stereo tape decks, six speaker models, five compact music systems, eight microphones "
Disposible income is extremely low, music just isn't that high on the priority list this year.
"you have to do indexing and search on your own"
Not strictly true, you have to do *ranking* on your own. Reading the docs it does let you reduce the document set, just not rank the finished result set. So you can filter the result set down to the matching documents, but which is the most important? Your algo decides.
Google and Yahoo give you finished results but only ones ranked by their own algorithms and then only the first 1000 result. Even then it's only 5000 query max for Yahoo and 1000 max for Google. Pretty feeble, I've used Yahoo Image API on a play site and maxed it out just from random blog traffic.
I guess giving patents to everyone for everything, lengthening copyright to forever and a day, and criminalizing minor infringements didn't work. Which is funny given that the proponents of this IP regime argue that this is what the USA can make money selling.
Now if only the EU isn't so dumb as to fall for the same rubbish....
nt.
Maybe I missed something but the second time it comes back to / it doesn't get a 302, it's given a 200 OK:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:42:58 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_pointer/0.8 PHP/4.4.1
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.1
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
So it's server side, the browser isn't preventing looping, its serving up the page it's given with is empty.
"The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years," said Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference."
Just book printers wanting protection. This is a big chance for writers, authors, even news agencies etc. They can all bypass the publishers and publish themselves. Before without a publisher they could print the book at a vanity printers, but couldn't get the distribution and so couldn't get into shops.
What use are book printers in a world without printed books? None at all.
"The net result is that a piece of music which Vaughan Williams wrote for the greater glory of God was not sung because of the copyright laws, and the excessive copyright terms. He couldn't have guarded against this - the term was life+20 at the time of his death."
I don't think thats the real problem with over-long copyrights. I think the problem is that the copyright holder has no incentive to invest in new works because they can milk the old works. Which is a pisser if you're todays "Vaughan Williams" since there's little incentive for companies to promote your works.
Perhaps the solution is for works to go into crown copyright after 20 years, so future earnings from works go to the tax man rather than the company promoting them. That would both encourage companies to invest in new works, and at the same time permitting the work be available for re-use by others.
"because it would break DNS horribly. it requires a single group of centalized servers be looked at to resolve any domain name rather than just to resolve a new TLD."
So you expand the cluster of root servers to fit demand, you don't query the root servers now, you query only a mirror. Think about it for a second, you type in "getfirefox" now, your browser tries the DNS, finds it doesn't exist, tries www. finds it doesn't exist, tries ****.com finds it doesn't exist, then queries Google. Google handles it as minor traffic, so the DNS would do likewise.