I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
Please don't take the sarcasm personally; it was just the best way to illustrate my point.
This isn't about listening to something or reading something. It's about the ability to remix and build upon it.
> I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
It doesn't matter, because most people don't profit from their works after 5 years, if they ever profit from it at all. The current law helps the Disneys and bestselling authors and has little to no effect on small, independent creators. I don't think we should optimize for corporations, I think we should optimize for everyone being able to reproduce, distribute and build upon their culture - with a period of potential financial motivation to kickstart the creation of new cultural artifacts. If you're still living off your work 5 years on, you're probably already rich.
Girl Talk's music is literally illegal because his instrument comes with a license agreement. What if Stratocasters had come with one?
> Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
This makes no sense. At all. Physical property and my culture are not comparable.
This kind of statement does not help your case at all.
Pirate Bay is not about remix culture. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Saying that it is just makes every single thing you say on the topic suspect.
I'm not in favor of the kind of restriction we see dicussed in this article. I'm against sopa/pipa/acta style approaches. But I also know that copying music and movies is 99.99% about getting something for free, not about remixing. So please. Be honest here.
Otherwise you just make the other side's arguments more powerful.
Yes, those pirate bay users are all about remixing and building upon stuff... /s
How about inventing something new?
I'm not sure why there's such a disparity between patents (which cost thousands of dollars and expire after 20 years), trademarks (which cost thousands of dollars, and have to be actively defended), and copyright (which costs nothing, is automatic, and expires after your grandchildren are dead).
Patents are applications of scientific discoveries. Other people are likely to make the same discoveries and want to apply them in a similar way, and that's legitimate.
Copyright covers things that are purely creations of the author. The author holding a copyright on something doesn't prevent or restrict anyone, except people who want to directly use the copyrighted work, which they wouldn't have come up with anyway (e.g. even if I write a novel about wizards, it would not be Harry Potter).
I agree that 5-10 years is probably too short of a period for intellectual property to be protected. Honestly, putting an arbitrary span of time on the duration is a suboptimal way of accomplishing the goals of copyright law. Why not protect an artist’s creation as long as he or she is alive, and then release it into the public domain upon his or her death? One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
So? How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?
Understanding the Native Americans from an anthropological point of view indicated the Land owned them. The Land provided food, water, shelter, warmth, entertainment, animals, and other things.
The trade of Manhattan for wampum beads is a perfect example: The European thought he got a killer deal because an island was worth far more than those beads. The Native thought, 'the land will be here after he dies, as he belongs to the land'. The native got a better deal because it wasn't a trade.
Native Americans of all the tribes had a very strong sense of ownership. If that was not the case, the Natives would have not signed treaties indicating that this is "X's territory".
