m2bord's Journal: The Copyright Debate

Anonymous Coward has posted a Firehouse article extolling the virtues of reducing the term of copyright protection to two years. While I agree with most everything said about reducing the length of copyright protection, I'll say that in the case of entertainment media, copy protection should be no longer than 30 months from the origination of copyright protection.

You see...copyright origination begins when the rights holder produces the first samples of work. This would encourage faster movement to the market.

Items like entertainment media items need to be protected from illegal sales and theft, yes but should Disney's Mickey be protected for more than 100 years and thus disallow another creator from creating a better version of Mickey? Is it in the public's interest that copyright lock up intellectual property for that long and thus stifle innovation and creativity?

The electronics industry and the hobbyists were lured into the PC and high tech arena because those users had a curiousity. They, like me, enjoy taking things apart just to see how they would work and how they could be made better.

There is one company that advertises on television who boasts that they don't make the things that make our lives easier. They make those things better. Well that's what we want to do. We want to tinker with the products that we buy to enable these items to better suit our needs.

Be it software, music, movies, whatever. If we cannot adapt it to suit our needs or our styles, the urge to tinker is repressed and good ideas are never born.

Finally...does anyone think that old school rappers like 2-Live Crew, NWA, or Sugar Hill Gang worried about copyright issues? They used existing music performed by other artists from other genres and reworked it to suit their needs. They did not steal an entire song but just bits and pieces. A hook here, an intro there, and an ending in between.

It is disingenuous of the entertainment industry to try to stifle the very creation that it seeks so hard to have us believe that they are seeking.