> I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and

Hideously expensive movies dont have to be made. Just made them cheap enough to be able to turn a profit within 7 years.

> But I'd still say that fifteen years should be a hard upper limit

I'm all for letting everybody vote on it in a referendum. In theory, copyright is supposed to be for the benefit of the people. Let the people decide directly which copyright duration maximizes their benefit. Content producers should not have a say in this at all other than in their individual refrerendum vote.

> some people clearly like it

"some people like it" is not gonna win over any siginficant shares of the desktop market. It wont win anything, it will just annihilate Shuttleworths money and then die off in an epic fail manner. Canonical should be in it to win it, not to merely corner some tiny irrelevant niche within the already tiny 1% Linux desktop market share. Ubuntu was supposed to win over Windows/Mac users, not to scare away its current user base.

"some people like it" is just another way to say "almost everybody else hates it with a passion (but why should we care?)"

North Korea style mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass punishment in order to make sharing of "prohibited information" a life threatening activity.

> I feel like I'm living in a weird parallel universe.

That is a inevitable consequence of Linux growing and becoming commercially interesting and "mainstream". Now the hackers do not have a say more in how their product is going to work and look like, this is now the sole decision of the Mac using "design team". The devs now just implement a specification and thats it. They maybe dont even use the abomination themselves, they maybe hate it es much as their users, but they simply dont pull the strings any more. Who would have thought, that once the year of the Linux desktop actually arrives, we might start hating what it has become.

What is even more ironical, Gnome is still a core GNU project, while even the FSF is recommending GNUstep instead.

> Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google

No, masses are irrelevant for success, G+ had to win those "leader" type of people who helped FB win, the high-influence college crowd, the trendsetters, the queen bees who basically get to decide what will used, the rest will simply have to passively follow like worker bees. FB was wildly successful long before everybodys aunt and grandma joined, because frankly, nobody cares about them. FB had the important (private) college crowd and thats all they wanted. The aunts and grandmas simply followed.

G+ made the fatal flaw in their strategy not to identify what made FB successful in the first place, getting high-value people on board first. They thought that an G+ account itself had enough worth to play the "invite only" gamble, but this was so wrong. The worth of an social netwrk account is not measured by features of the account itself, but by "which indispensable people are exclusively on there". Nobody indispensable was exclusively on G+, so G+ had no power to force the masses to abandon FB in order to not be cut off from their influential peers on G+.

Then Google made the next fatal flaw to massively fuck off early adopters, who _did_ bother to go where nobody has gone before and to make an account. The early adopters were people who were fed up with FB's privacy breaches and looked for a more moderate alternative. They were not just amazed b G+ features, they looked for a second, less intrusive home. And what did Google do to those terraformers, who were supposed to turn into evangelists and make G+ attractive to non-members? Google started threatening and deleting their accounts, forcing "real names", talking about an perverse "identity service" under which no anonymous thought will be allowed to be expressed. The attack against enthusiastic early adopters gave everybody a sense of things to come, that Google+ will not be better than FB in any imaginable way privacy wise, that their ego is already inflated so long before they have a large enough user base to justify it. There will be no second wave of early adopters, the news has already been spread that the new master is as ruthless and abusive as the current master, so theres no point in relocating.

By Googles own actions, it became clear that FB just isnt that bad as everybody thought before G+.

> Why do people ignore the laws against filesharing? Because they do not understand why they exist.

Wrong. We, the filesharing people perfectly know why they exist, thanks.

We ignore filesharing laws because the laws are bad. We ignore them because they know that the majority of our peers neither support nor obey those laws. Those laws do not reflect our natural democratic sense of right and wrong that should guide any lawmaking. We ignore them because the laws have not been decided in a democratic way, they have been created in pre-democratic times and since then enforced top down by a small, influential minority against a majority opposing those laws. The majority of us do not gain any benefits from copyright laws, we only have our natural right to exchange information with their peers artificially restricted for the financial benefit of the few. We ignore filesharing laws because we do not want our communication to be somebody elses "oil of the 21'st century".

In short, we ignore your laws because we, the people neither want them nor did we create them. It was you and your ilk who created them not for the benefit of us all, but solely for your own.

Dear creators,

> We deserve to get paid for our work

But finding out actually _how_ to get paid is your problem. If you cant, nobody owes you a working business model. You dont somehow _have_ to work as a creator. If nobody wants to voluntarily pay you for doing creative stuff, go flip burgers.

> your desire to get other people's valuable hard work for free

This is not about "getting free stuff", no matter how often you creators repeat it.

The unpleasent fact about life is that people like to exchange information with each other, i.e. information wants to be free. Creative works are bits of information. To enforce your current business model, you have to constantly monitor and log the internet habits of millions and millions of people, and you have to punish millions and millions of them for something they feel is not wrong: exchanging useful information with their peers. Nobody cares that you declared parts of this information your "property", this kind of property is an artificial construct and is not widely supported. Your business modes is _very_ unnatural, it is literaly a fierce for-profit censorship scheme, with a giant apparatus doing nothing else but prosecuting people for too freely talking to each other, it is like North Korea applied to music.

> is not only unfair, but it's ultimately self-destructive

This is not your decision. In a democracy, we should be able to vote what is fair / unfair / constructive / destructive. Copyright, as we know it, is perceived as a mightily destructive force by a majority of people, which has been able to survive that long because of lobbyism, govermental intransparency (like having ACTA declared a threat level national security) and a tight relationship with publishing houses.

Todays copyright is opposing to the will of the majority of people, and if this democracy thingie is even worth half of what its called, then by hell, we will get rid of today's copyright soon. The established party system is actively preventing any kind of change, but as long as we can get a new, young, fresh party in (sorry US, get rid of your system or you will soon look old), we will be working on it. And if suing people for a living is your money making scheme, dear creator, you should start looking for another job soon.

> then the year Windows 8 is released really will be the Year of the Linux desktop

Sadly, it wont. Why? You'll answer it yourself in a second:

> I do NOT want to deal with dumbass touch interfaces on a PC, whether that's Windows 8, iOS, or frakking Unity.

The traditional Linux desktops are already ruined, KDE3, Gnome2, all butchered, all gone. Theres only XFCE left, but thats too small, too hobbyist (its basically a one man show), too volatile. KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity are breathteakingly bad and laughably unusable compared to what we once had. Fuck that "designer driven" brave new shit.

Microsoft is finally commiting big-style seppuku, and theres no serious Linux contender to pick up the expected masses of castaways, because Linux desktops have been _already_ gutted. Thanks Apple.

> They want to appear on Google web searches, but they don't want to be aggregated on Google News.

Google News is not much different than a google search. It is search specialized on news, like code search is specialized on code and blog search is specialized on blogs. You search for a headline, you get a list of headlines. Then you pick the one you want to go to and google sends you to the newspaper site with the story. You can not read the story on google, google does not copy the story the newspapers have written.

What the newspapers want though, is Google not to send users to the searched-for news stories _directly_, but to the _homepages_ of the newspapers, to force the users to click themselves through newspaper ads before they reach the stories they wanted to read in the first place. They dont want google to work like a search engine, but like a recommendation i.e. advertisment engine. "You just searched for news on Milow? The Belgian Daily might have a story about him. Goto: belgiandaily.be". Google would be suicidal to ever give in to that sort of blackmailing, because not linking directly to stories the user searched for would render their news search engine useless.

Just imagine the general google search not deep linking to search results but always sending you to the respective homepages. This is exactly what those newspapers are trying to enforce.

> Google is a private, foreign, totally unaccountable organisation.

So are Belgian newspapers.

> They're just getting too much power over the Internet these days.

So obviously do Belgian newspapers.

> And their power is only growing

The power of Belgian newspapers has also just grown a little bit. Now they have the power to prevent you from linking to them, even if you are outside of Belgium.

> Isn't it time to put a stop to that?!

Yes it is, and it is exactly what Google did.

Twitter itself is worthless as a technology, as it's basically an IRC server publicly displaying querys and #channel logs, nowadays fancily rebranded as #hashtags. The primary worth of Twitter consists of influential users publishing information exclusively on twitter. Nobody important publishes exclusively on Identica, so nobody uses Identica.

> digital copies last in pristine condition even when handled by schoolkids

This problem could have been solved by handing out pdfs, which they can print out over and over again. They could make notes on them and still have the originals. They wouldnt have to carry the whole book around all the time, they could just take a few pages they need. They wouldnt have to take as care of them as of books, becouse they could always be reprinted when destroyed or lost.

Why does the education system rely on overpriced commercial literature at all? Why doesnt it work to hire 1-2 experts per subject and let them write for hire definitive textbooks for the particular subject which then could be used without any royalties for years and decades by thousands of students? Why are they forced to buy new books over and over when everybody has a printer at home?

The so called "due process" wasnt laid out for a case where basically millions and millions of people, i.e. the majority of a country's population, are guilty and have to be prosecuted by comparably a tiny number of prosecutors. Usually, something that the majority of people doesnt consider wrong and does on a daily basis isnt even illegal. But in the case of enforcing copyright, you basically have a small, very small minority trying to force the majority into not doing something very basic like information exchange against their will and against their intrinsic sense of right and wrong. If due process is required in every of all those "educational" lawsuits, the few prosecutors would never get enough of them to have the envisioned shock & awe educational effect on the majority. Since disproportionately harsh example punishments like decimation are politcally and legally not yet possible, getting all the filthy pirates _can_ only work if the assumption is made that every accusation is justified and the wrongdoing highly probable, and the process then fully automated according to this assumption.

> "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them

We, the people, did NEVER grant them those rights in the first place. Never. Those "rights" were all created and granted in pre-democratic times and simply dragged along for centuries. Those rights have literarily NEVER been confirmed by a populous vote. Never.

What we, the people, did do though, is to never oppose those rights directly, since the established parties of the so called "representative democracy" dont let us vote on it directly. The only way to try to bypass the party shield and to get to vote on copyright directly was by forming worldwide pirate parties, but they all failed because the issue of copyright may be important, but is just too small to justify a dedicated party.

This means:
* Established parties will never let us vote on copyright directly because they know the outcome.
* All established parties a uniform pro-strong-copyright policy because theyre in bed with paying publishers.
* The pirate parties will never become big enough because the issue is too small compared to other issues.
* Copyright is effectively, by being comparably a small issue, smuggled under the democratic radar by the parties&publishers.

And leads to the conclusion:
* Voters are not, were not and will not ever be able to affect copyright policy in _any_ way.

> "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them

To sum up the answer to your statement: We The People did not make this grant, we do not support this grant, and we are effectively shielded off from disabling this grant precisely _because_ it is precisely us who this grant from the beginning on was directed against.

Let the people vote on copyright (they never did, they never will), and copyright as we know it will cease to exist (and this is the reason).

> Being able to "re-invent" something should nullify a patent completely.

How are you gonna distinguish re-inventing and simply copying? How is somebody supposed to prove having no knowledge of a previous patent after he nullified it by "re-inventing"? The patent system should stay as it is, but up the patentability level way higher, to a level of difficulty where people arent able to simply re-invent something just by sitting down and thinking about it a little, i.e. to the level of the often required, but seldom delivered non-obviousness.

The problems with the patent system arent rooted in the patent system existing, but in the low level of patentability, which allows for stuff to be patented which thousands of independent researchers can come up with. Instead of incentivizing them to solve hard problems, the system incentivizes them to be the first to file patents for easier but unpatented problems, so it is more of a intellectual land rush.