Copyright, design and patents. As someone with anarchist tendencies and who supports open source you might expect me to be against the above. However I have no problem with someone who chooses to restrict free use of their work for a period of time and gains an income from it. People are able, and many do, to publish an invention without patenting it to allow free use and development. I do have a problem with the ever expanding time copyright etc is being made to apply and the restrictive use of patents that should never have been granted in the first place to help create/maintain IT monopolies. There are attempts to standardise most legislation to 70 years or more after the death of the author/creator. I see no good reason for a limit of more than 50 years from publication/creation. If something remains popular and is selling well after 50 years then the creator should have had the sense to put some money aside for their latter years or for their families. If I wrote a story at 15, lived until I was 95 then, as the law stands, 150 years from me putting pen to paper my great, great, great, grandchildren would be getting an income - that is not reasonable. Of course if you are a session musician or a composer then it is the music companies who will take the bulk if not all of any monies. How about creators being able to claim royalties/licences for their work for 25 years? If they feel that a longer period is justified/required an extension can be paid for at the time the work is registered to take it up to 50 - the fee could be set to cover the average costs of recovering and distributing funds. There will be cases where a young artist cannot afford to extend the period and does not become popular until many decades after their work was created who would lose out with these changes. However the main effect would be to constrict the profiteering of corporate publishing, music and software/tech companies. Individuals should, if the so chose, be able to recover monies from commercial use of their creative work for a reasonable period. We should not be pandering to corporations wishing to continue to profiteer for generations.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 07:08:48 +0000
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