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.

Guess again.

Trademarks only exist so long as they serve as a source identifier for marked goods or services. That is, LEVI'S is a trademark because pants with that mark on them can only come from Levi Strauss & Co. But BLUE JEANS is not a trademark (for pants) because pants with that mark on them could come from anywhere.

Once Steamboat Willie hits the public domain, everyone is entitled to make copies of it. This means that a good which has MICKEY MOUSE in it can come from anywhere. And so MICKEY MOUSE cannot function as a trademark, at least for animated films. Further, everyone will be entitled to make new movies which are derivative of Steamboat Willie, if only in that they also feature the Mickey Mouse character (though without any of the changes he's had since 1928). So new animated films will appear as well.

You could still presumably have those novelty ice cream bars that carried the MICKEY MOUSE trademark, or those mouse eared party balloons, but that's probably little consolation to Disney.

This all basically dates back to the interaction of a patent and a trademark case: when shredded wheat was invented, it was patented and sold under the SHREDDED WHEAT trademark. Eventually the patent expired and competitors began selling the same product using the same mark, and the Supreme Court found they had every right to do so, since SHREDDED WHEAT was the name of the product that could now come from anywhere.

Also there was a more recent case in which the Supreme Court again pointed out that trademarks are not a substitute for copyright, and cannot be used to get around the constitutionally required time limits on the duration of copyrights or patents.

(And ironically, meanwhile, there is some reason to think that Steamboat Willie is already in the public domain, due to the specific requirements of the copyright law that applied at the time it was originally released. But the question has never been properly settled, AFAIK.)

Meh. It works both ways. Authors who wanted to write a sequel to a movie would just have to wait for a little while before they'd have their chance.

And in any case, I don't think that your scenario with the movies is terribly likely. Movie studios like to have exclusivity. If no one had jumped on, say, Cryptonomicon rapidly, and then it turned into a waiting game, having two different big budget adaptations of it at the same time would piss off both studios involved. This means they'll have to either develop original stories (which is fine; copyright is all about increasing quantity) or they'll have to take chances and act early in order to avoid getting screwed. Or they'll collude, but we got two rival attack-on-DC movies last year, so I don't think they're doing that so much.

They're not. Movie rights for books, unless the book is a best seller by a big name author, usually amount to very little money in the grand scheme of things. Certainly well, well under a million dollars for ordinary books. The catering budget is probably a bigger expense.

So? I'm sure that some serious lovers of opera dislike the idea of having The Barber of Seville or The Valkyrie used in Bugs Bunny cartoons. If you don't like it, don't listen to it. But don't go telling the rest of us what to do.

Well, the point of copyright is to have works created and published which otherwise wouldn't've been, and to have them in the public domain as fully and quickly as possible. The goal is to promote the progress of science, that is, knowledge.

If the source code is granted copyright protection, it ought to be published so that people can learn from it, and so that when it enters the public domain (or prior, if an applicable exception to copyright applies) it can be modified by anyone who wants to modify it, just as any public domain work may be modified.

Just as patents and trade secrets cannot apply for the same invention, we should not allow trade secrets and copyrights to apply for the same work. If someone wants to keep a program secret, then fine, but why does it benefit the public to grant a copyright on a secret program?

As for piracy of the published source, that would still be illegal, just as pirating a published novel is illegal. Every sort of work under the sun has to deal with this except for software; why should software be treated differently?

I guess I do, technically.

First, copyright protects expressions of ideas, but not the underlying ideas themselves. E.g. anyone can make a game about a woman who hunts for treasure by raiding tombs and shooting endangered wildlife. But you can't just outright copy Tomb Raider's code, art assets, and so forth.

Second, the reason for granting copyrights isn't so that people can profit from their works, but so that the public profits from having more works created and published than otherwise would've been, and in the public domain as much as possible, as soon as possible. That copyrights may have economic value which can provide a profit for authors is a side effect, a means to an end. It's not the actual point, though.

I don't have an objection to copyright generally, however, provided that it produces a better outcome for the public than if we didn't have copyright.

And coincidentally, 15 years is the maximum duration that copyrights should last, according to the only proper study of economic incentives surrounding copyright of which I am aware.

We could use some more research on this, but it sounds okay to me.

If you can crack it apart, then you can just bury the graphite in the empty coal mines and oil wells, if there's no better use for it.

But this is so energy intensive that's it's not likely to happen anytime soon.

As for a limnic eruption, that just gets CO2 out of solution from water. It doesn't get it off the planet. Earth's gravity is too strong for that.