This is a cloudy issue and the author is incorrect on some points.
The Patent Office is screwed up. I agree 50-75 years past the author's death is too long for many things. For music, 5-10 years is plenty. For software, 2-3 years is probably enough. And stop giving out patents for incredibly obvious stuff that people have already been doing for years like IBM's Run Length Encoding patent or Amazon.com's One-Click Checkout. That's not innovation, that's lazy patent office clerks. But software does need protection from the rampant piracy that is happening today. I had an Atari 8-bit computer and the pirates put that platform out of business. They had leaks in each major software house and they were so fast that as a kid I had most games before they even hit the shelves.
I would agree with the music issue, except that the artists make practically nothing off the recordings right now (the songwriters make some). They already have to tour if they want to make money. So, taking away copyrights on music really doesn't hurt the artists too much, especially if they tour a lot. The Grateful Dead apparently figured this out when they stopped cracking down on bootlegging. But if we just allowed free copying of music on the web, the songwriters would make nothing. I agree that music publishing houses are parasites that should go away, but they spend money on advertizing and need to make a profit on "pushing" a group. They should not make the lion's share like they do right now; that's extortion since they control the distribution channels.
Movies cost a fortune to produce and the way to recoup that is in theaters plus video sales plus add-ons (toys, etc.). If everyone uses MPEG-4 to burn DVD quality movies onto CD-R, then why would anyone buy the DVDs? It's worse if we can get them for $4 on PPV before the video release and do it from our TiVos and Replays (especially DirecTiVo) and get a nearly perfect copy, which we then distribute to 20 friends each. The movie industry needs some protection for their large capital investment.
Basically, fair use says that we should be able to make as many copies as we want, but only for our own household and to protect our investment. We should be able to take clips from songs or movies, but not the whole thing. Unfortunately, the mechanics of copy protection are usually more along the lines of infinity or zero. So users want infinity and content providers want zero. About 80% of the people I know mod-chipped their Playstation and have hundreds of games copied onto CD-Rs. Most of these people copied games from friends' CD-Rs. You can't tell me that didn't hurt Playstation game sales.
I do find it humorous that ZDNet owns this guy's content, despite the fact that they have a disclaimer stating that they don't claim it at all.
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PRMan
The Patent Office is screwed up. I agree 50-75 years past the author's death is too long for many things. For music, 5-10 years is plenty. For software, 2-3 years is probably enough. And stop giving out patents for incredibly obvious stuff that people have already been doing for years like IBM's Run Length Encoding patent or Amazon.com's One-Click Checkout. That's not innovation, that's lazy patent office clerks. But software does need protection from the rampant piracy that is happening today. I had an Atari 8-bit computer and the pirates put that platform out of business. They had leaks in each major software house and they were so fast that as a kid I had most games before they even hit the shelves.
I would agree with the music issue, except that the artists make practically nothing off the recordings right now (the songwriters make some). They already have to tour if they want to make money. So, taking away copyrights on music really doesn't hurt the artists too much, especially if they tour a lot. The Grateful Dead apparently figured this out when they stopped cracking down on bootlegging. But if we just allowed free copying of music on the web, the songwriters would make nothing. I agree that music publishing houses are parasites that should go away, but they spend money on advertizing and need to make a profit on "pushing" a group. They should not make the lion's share like they do right now; that's extortion since they control the distribution channels.
Movies cost a fortune to produce and the way to recoup that is in theaters plus video sales plus add-ons (toys, etc.). If everyone uses MPEG-4 to burn DVD quality movies onto CD-R, then why would anyone buy the DVDs? It's worse if we can get them for $4 on PPV before the video release and do it from our TiVos and Replays (especially DirecTiVo) and get a nearly perfect copy, which we then distribute to 20 friends each. The movie industry needs some protection for their large capital investment.
Basically, fair use says that we should be able to make as many copies as we want, but only for our own household and to protect our investment. We should be able to take clips from songs or movies, but not the whole thing. Unfortunately, the mechanics of copy protection are usually more along the lines of infinity or zero. So users want infinity and content providers want zero. About 80% of the people I know mod-chipped their Playstation and have hundreds of games copied onto CD-Rs. Most of these people copied games from friends' CD-Rs. You can't tell me that didn't hurt Playstation game sales.
I do find it humorous that ZDNet owns this guy's content, despite the fact that they have a disclaimer stating that they don't claim it at all.
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PRMan
