[pp.int.general] An answer to RMS' critique of the PP.SE political programme

[Sven Clement]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 2:11 AM, Edison Carter <
the.real.edison.carter at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Varable length copyright is not something I will ever agree with. I do not
> care if it's based on media type, the nature of the content or it's
> perceived usefulness, copyright held by a person vs. copyright held by a
> corporation, or the licence used. I very strongly believe that all copyright
> should expire a uniform number of years after the creation of a work. This
> would make it so much easier to be sure that a work is no longer in
> copyright before being able to make use of it in a commercial way. Otherwise
> we have the problem of works still being locked away long beyond their
> copyright because even though the copyright has expired, nobody can be sure
> of it.
>

Thinking about this topic for quite a while, I realized that no solution
will be 100% perfect, I do see the problem that if software is licensed as
open source and the copyright expires that then someone could use the
software under a closed source license for the next X years. But still the
software would be available in the version that was available before the
copyright expired.

Thus I came to the conclusion, that an uniform expiration date for all works
should be introduced, the length should be subject to further discussions
with experts in the industry to guarantee, that a creator would not loose
more than 20% in average.

To illustrate:
We know that most books are sold in the 2 years after the publication, so if
we would limit the copyright to 5 years a book author would not loose much
money.
Software is normally considered old after 5 yrs so that there would be no
problem neither, movies and music idem, so we should first and foremost try
to find a consensus, if we want variable or fixed length copyright and after
that we should discuss the exact terms with experts knowing how the
industries work.

Sven
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