Hey, I'm totally happy with getting rid of as many jobs as possible through automation, so long as people still get paid enough to live comfortably. The leisure society is where it's at.

But ours are all stuck at the bottom of a big gravity well. Materials mined on the moon, or better yet, nearby asteroids, are not. They could be sent down to us as raw materials to be turned into finished goods here, but alternatively we could begin to industrialize space.

There are plenty of plans on the books for building solar power arrays that could send power down to us cleanly, for example. It's too expensive to build them with parts that come from the Earth, but it might be more practical with parts that didn't.

It has plenty of oxygen and aluminum, which would be useful. Near Earth asteroids are probably a better bet, however.

How could that have possibly happened, given that in 1994, a runaway planet hurtled between the Earth and the Moon, breaking the moon into two big chunks, unleashing cosmic destruction, and casting man's civilization into ruin.

And while it would be good to get rid of mining operations on Earth, replacing it with space mining, the main advantage of mining in space is that you do not need to use a giant rocket to get that stuff into space; it's already up there, and can be used for industrial purposes in situ.

Trademarks are fine, of course.

You didn't create the copyright. Everyone else gave it to you (via our servant, the government). We didn't do this out of the kindness of our hearts; we did it out of self interest. And being a deal made out of self interest, and with you having no real alternatives or bargaining power, it should favor us very strongly.

If you don't like it, don't create anything, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Of course there would be a canon. In fact, there might be several different ones. And fans could choose whichever they liked best. God knows this is already common with copyrighted materials.

Not to mention of course that even the Biblical Canon is not universally agreed upon, but somehow the world hasn't ended.

If you could make a DVD sequel to Star Wars in 1982 (remember, you can't use anything added in Empire!) then I'd say that you deserve to make it. Put those Laserdisc and Selectavision guys in their place!

Yes you could; the SPIDER-MAN trademark with regard to comic books and many other goods would become generic. I discussed this in another post in this thread.

It's copyrights that protect characters. Copyrights on the works that the characters appear in. Each trait of the character is protected in the work in which it first appears. So Spider-Man's basic costume, web swinging, origin, etc. all comes from Amazing Fantasy #15. But Peter Parker's sideline of bringing pictures of Spider-Man to J. Jonah Jameson doesn't show up until The Amazing Spider-Man #2, so you'd have to wait for that one to also hit the public domain to introduce that trait.

Well, the reason why I'm opposed to software patents is because I don't think they're necessary. There are such significant incentives to invent and bring to market inventions in the field of software that a patent monopoly really has no meaningful incentivizing effect. And software does a pretty good job of disclosing itself; it's very open to being reverse engineered, so disclosure isn't a good reason to grant software patents either.

We could probably stop granting software patents and see the pace of invention in that field increase. Sounds like a good reason to me. If it slows down, we could revisit the matter. Same thing with business methods.

And this is bad, why? (Other than that the world probably has more pokemon now than it ever needed) Besides, there are already loads of Poke-knockoffs. Is it so terrible that they exist?

Well, this is a somewhat more special case, actually.

Copyright doesn't protect processes, procedures, systems, or methods of operation. Such as the rules for a card game. (The classic example is a method of double entry bookkeeping, if you're curious)

Rules can be patented, OTOH, if they meet the usual rules for utility patents, such as novelty and nonobviousness. The 'tap' rule in Magic is patented. Once that expires, next year, IIRC, anyone can make and sell Magic cards. They'll have to watch the trademark -- so they might be sold as, oh, let's say MERRORMY brand playing cards, with a note that says they're compatible with Magic the Gathering, but not authorized by Hasbro. With new art and wording, but identical point scores and... I don't know how Magic actually works... suits?

Hasbro might sponsor official tournaments which only allow for official Hasbro cards to be used, but that's like having Goodyear sponsor a car race where only Goodyear tires can be used. It doesn't stop other people from doing their own thing.

It doesn't have to be a shady Chinese outfit. You can do it. I might, if I didn't think that Magic was cardboard crack, and best avoided.

See my other post in this thread re: trademarks not having great odds of survival when applicable copyrights expire.

Its not JUST about the money. Maybe the author doesn't want some shitty Hollywood hack job done to his book directed by McG starring Justin Bieber. Or a no budget straight to DVD release put out by one of those crappy TV movie-mills. I'm willing to give the author the right not to see that done to his work while he's alive, if that's what he wants.

Why? I'm willing to give the author just about any sort of thing if it ultimately provides a greater benefit for the public than it causes harm to the public. But otherwise, I couldn't give a rat's ass what the author wants.

After all, what I want -- what we all want -- are works. We want the author's output. If it just magically appeared, or was retrieved out of Borges' library, we wouldn't even need the authors to begin with.

Authors are like dairy cows. They're a necessary evil in order to get the milk, and should be treated however we need to treat them to get the most milk at the least cost. But we don't otherwise care what the cow wants, and we'd love to cut the cow out of the equation altogether somehow.

I believe this also answers your question about fans. Of course the fans should be in charge. They outnumber the authors. But they're not well organized, and can be a bit romantic, so we end up with authors exploiting fans when it ought to be the other way 'round.

Well, dead or alive, you don't have to watch them.

Copyrights usually have zero economic value. In rare cases, they have some value, but it's short lived. Only in the rarest of rare cases, do they have long lasting economic value, and usually those copyrights were valuable all along, and still tended to enjoy most of the value at the start.

So the idea of having copyrights as a substitute for pensions is as bad as having lottery tickets mailed out periodically instead of social security checks. A few lucky people will strike it rich, but it's no good for the vast majority.

And anyway, if you want financial support, surely a system that is applicable to everyone, rather than just highly successful and lucky artists would be more fair.

Why?

It's patently obvious that some classes of work have longer copyright-related economic lifespans than others.

A daily newspaper loses most of its copyright related economic value by the evening of the day it is published, at best. The next day it's fit for nothing better than to line birdcages or wrap fish. Weekly magazines don't last long either, nor do certain TV programs. OTOH, a math textbook can easily sell well for decades, and a movie can be released and rereleased in various different media and venues for years.

Video games and computer software are on the shorter end of the continuum. Five years is plenty.

And there's nothing wrong with wanting free shit. If we didn't want free shit, we wouldn't have copyrights to begin with; the whole point is to cause there to be greater amounts of free shit in the end than there otherwise would be.

Provided that they do not do so in a way that constitutes fraud, why not?

Except for a teeny tiny exception (not applicable to video games at all, btw), we don't have an attribution right in the US, and we never have had one. But we've got a thriving art industry, which is just as thriving, I'd say, as that of countries that do have an attribution right.

So the attribution right doesn't provide any benefit for the public because it doesn't incentivize authors to create or publish more works than they would if they didn't have it. We know this because the US is at no disadvantage, works-wise. So all it does is burden the public for no good reason.

In that case, we're better off not granting such a right. It does nothing beneficial for the public yet incurs at least some degree of harm.

Mickey Mouse is a character in Steamboat Willie. You don't get his later attributes, until those works enter the public domain. So you don't even get the red of his shorts. But you do get the Mouse as he originally was, and you can do a lot with that. Plus IIRC you also get Minnie and Pete.

And as I've pointed out elsewhere, some of the trademarks will be lost as the work enters the public domain; the ones that would interfere with making new Mouse movies.

Sure. And the Mona Lisa is in the public domain, but the Louvre guards wouldn't like it if I tried to bring it down to the copy shop. S.B. is on DVD. That's probably good enough for most people.