[Clipart] Fwd: Copyleft, Public Domain, Copyright

[Nicu Buculei]

Schrijver wrote:
> I think current copyright legislation is kinda cool.
> It provides protection to the individual.
> 
> Old copyright legislation in the US sucked bad,
> I think it is partly the reason the media industry could get the amount 
> of power it had; because it could circumvent actually paying the creators.
> 
> Possibilities for nastyness, court games and powerpolitics are IMHO now 
> to be found outside of copyright, elsewhere, I guess, like the Millenium 
> Act in the US, and the proposed saving of all surfing data within the 
> European Union.
> 
> But I do not see how copyright in itself is hampering progress; I think 
> it is the lack of knowledge of the general public that is; once you 
> start to see copyright as a right attributed to your self, it becomes 
> another way of empowerment.

Reducing to "copyright in itself" is very limiting, without copyright 
licenses like GPL or CC-BY-SA would not be possible, so yes, there are 
positive parts.

But there are so many broken things, like the insanely long period of 
time for the copyright to expire (with the feat that the current works 
will never expire, see the Mickey Mouse example). This is hurting the 
universal culture: we are not allowed to use so many cultural icons in 
our day to day lives... like the "happy birthday to you" song or the 
"ampelfrau" traffic sign.

-- 
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