On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Dale E Sterner <sunbeam...@juno.com> wrote: > I stand corrected. What I heard was that senator Sonie Bono had the law > extended.
Senator Bono (one half of pop music duo Sonny and Cher) had ties to the entertainment industry, and pushed for life of copyright to be extended. As mentioned, DisneyCo was unhappy because the original conception of Mickey Mouse was about to fall into the public domain. > The europeans went a step futher and extended it even > futher. I was talking to a woman who writes music and > she said she had to renew every couple of years for > a very small fee. What I don't understand is why copyrights > last so much longer than patents Patents can cost billions > to perfect. How long a copyright should last is an ongoing battle. The original incentive for copyrights was to encourage creative work by giving the creators exclusive rights to revenues derived from sale of what they created, and the original life was intended to permit that but expire after a period of years, allowing the work to lapse into the public domain. What we now face is a situation where work might *never* lapse into the public domain. The US is currently Life + 70 years. Australia used to be Life + 50, changed to Life + 70, but work that had already lapsed into the public domain in Ausrtalia under the old rules was grandfathered, and did not magically come under copyright again. Canada is still Life + 50, and the Project Gutenberg Canada site is leading the fight to keep it that way. There are people making a good case it's time to simply abolish copyrights, as they largely no longer serve the original intended purpose. Patents also have designated expiration dates. But unlike copyrights, you do have to jump through hoops to get them. In the US, you must submit an application to the USPTO, and it must be examined and approved before a patent is issued. There's a lot of unhappiness in the computer industry about the process. For instance, you don't get a patent if it can be demonstrated that prior art exists, and you are trying to patent something that has already been in use before you came along and you have not made something new. Patent examiners are overworked, and in many cases simply not qualified to judge the merits of the patent applied for. And for more fun, look at trademarks, where you must apply for trademark and wait to see whether anyone objects. Star wrestler Hulk Hogan had to negotiate a license from Marvel comics to be able to call himself Hulk because Marvel had trademarked the name. > cheers > DS ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
