Maybe this is Nintendo's way of helping them. Instead of ignoring them, they shut them down and gave them a lot of attention they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

It is something known as a metaphor. Copyright makes many works unavailable to lots of people, just like burning works would.

The point is that the big corporations could get their copyright as long as they want as long as they think the copyright is valuable enough. Right now we see Disney constantly getting copyright extended so they can keep Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain, but the only way to do that is to extend copyright on everything. With this new system they could decide the length of the copyright based on how important the work is to them. That means we can let them have 70 years of copyright on Mickey, but only 7 or 14 years copyright on most other things. Much better than today's system where we have to have ridiculously long copyrights on everything so Disney protect one important work.

So you should say IMFO? Some people might misinterpret that as another common word that starts with F.

Left 4 dead was launched 13 months ago, so either I missed the memo about redefining the length of a year or someone has invented a time machine.