Firstly, I would like to thank Mrs. Greaves for coming and talking to us about copyright. I thought she did a great job of teaching us about copyright while also doing it in an entertaining way. Second, on a more serious note I would like to discuss copyright. I personally think that copyright is a very reasonable and valid concept.
The issue that I’m going to discuss is concerning the amount of time after publication (or author death) before a work becomes part of the public domain. I personally think that the Sonny Bono act of 1998, which extended the time before a work entered the public domain by twenty years, was a great act. I think authors and companies should be able to keep the rights to their creation for a long, long time. If one did not get a "reward" (royalties) off of their creation, than why would they have bothered to create in the first place? Without copyright protection, there would be little to no incentive for authors, artists, scientists, and/ or companies to create new things. This would dramatically reduce the growth and success of our nation.
The other side of this issue is that extending the length of the patents, greatly reduces the amount of information available to the Public Domain. By the time a work enters the public domain, it will be close to 70-95 years out of date depending on if it was due to a deceased author or publication. These long years of copyright protection make the public domain essentially useless.
This is a hot topic that many people have their own ideas and opinions on. I think that long periods of copyright protection are necessary to promote growth however, I’m sure that many disagree with me on that which is fine by me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I understand where you're coming from Nick, but I have to disagree with you :) I think that if royalties are the only motivation that people have to create new things, then we have bigger problems than copyright laws. The laws were put into place to allow for protection of ideas, not guarantee that people can make money off things even after they've passed away.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, you did a great job of presenting the other side :)
No You rong Amy and nick i like downloading illegal stuff
ReplyDeleteTechnology, innovation, growth, success... whatever you want to call it... is of no value when starvation and environmental damage is rampant in the world. We shouldn't be throwing away money to all these things which copyright profits from with disregard for the rest. Our qualities of life are fine the way they are. We need now focus on other things. Copyright should be abolished; mass-media eliminated.
ReplyDeleteWe should save our money and give more to government taxes which will go towards eliminating environmental issues and poverty in the world. It doesn't matter that our first-world countries are "at the top of the pack". that is a selfish mind-frame.
Artists should only make profits from live performance and original (not duplicated) works.
The internet cannot be reliably governed anyway. There is always a way for savvy computer users to loophole restrictions in an anonymous manner. And the internet is too useful to shut down.