It is fair use when you rip the stuff on earth and put it on your backup server on the moon. The question is if it is covered by law when you send a remote command to start sharing it from the moon.

Unless it was something created by someone on the ISS (unlikely of course) as a thrown together addition to an experiment/something to interpret the results

In some ways they still are (buffers in equipment, etc.) but it just happens so fast you rarely notice it

Well then instead it would be 'you have exclusive rights for x amount of time and then the work goes into the public domain'.

Shouldn't matter as long as the reason it was taken down was due to it not holding up in court. Just find a copy on a place like www.archive.org

All these fights on copyright have made me think. If an author was well known enough, the books were in high demand, etc. would they have enough pull to require that the publishers release their works into the public domain after a certain period of time, upon the author's death, or a certain number of years after the author's death? Or would even some of the top authors have to find other means to publish their books?

Of course if a new author tried this they would be told 'screw you, do what we say or find another company' but when you have an author where amazon and other companies have extra security for just that book to prevent leaks (harry potter, I think one of the dan brown books may have been this way, etc.) would there be any difference?

You also have writers, movie producers, etc. who, while they do it to make a living, refuse to sacrifice on the quality of their work just to make more money (or any money). They will not just sell the rights to a book, for example, to make a movie and let it end there. It better fit with their expectations of what the movie should be compared to the book. (If I remember right JK Rowling was not/is not only heavily involved in the movie making process she required that they do certain things). The trick is for an author to find a balance between making a living and maintaining their image of their work. If they don't understand that some compromise has to be made to fit a 500-1000 page book into 1.5-3 hours then they need to reevaluate whether it is worth having it turned into a movie.

The issue is when it is the family controlling this, things that the author would have flat out refused to allow to happen get done with the permission of someone else.

I am guessing if you are an independent developer you could just put something similar to this in the license 'as of 25 years after the original release of this version of this software I release this software into the public domain'

Note: this is the same thing with any software as well, as copies are made into most of the same locations as well as the files themselves in the operating system's buffer/cache in RAM

Fairly offtopic but if copying into ram is an issue.... whenever I watch a rented movie I am making probably 3+ temporary copies of the movie while watching it. Is this illegal? (by the standards of the copyright holders/actual law both)
1. In the disk drive
2. ?On the controller itself?
3. In ram
4. ?In the CPU cache?
5. In video card memory
6. If it is outputting to a screen that does any of it's own processing you can probably add a few more here

Of course these are fractions of the movie (or even a frame of a movie) at any point in time but the entire thing passes through. Since sharing fractions of a movie over P2P software is illegal, shouldn't making multiple copies of a movie that is owned by someone else illegal?

Note: this is a joke for now but I have a feeling sooner or later it is going to end up in a lawsuit somewhere

Eventually it is going to be much more common to self publish for these reasons. Yes it happens a ton already but you aren't going to get your book into all the chain stores by yourself. If you can self publish on a major ebook (or on demand print) store with the option to opt out of this service, keep all rights to terminate distribution, etc. then more people will start doing it.

They can't be forced to but can someone say 'we will pay you an extra million to give up this right' is that legal?

There is a difference between a right to sell the original works and a right to do whatever you want. Similar to how an author can sell right to publish to one person (even limiting it to certain regions of the world, as many books have different publishers in different areas of the world), right to make a movie to another, etc. The contract probably states if the publisher has the right to make certain modifications.

It may.... we may a) blow ourselves up or b)manage to blow up the sun (see a.)

Failures of the power source of power steering are relatively easy to fix (use the wheels to either generate electricity or keep turning the pump). Failure of the steering system itself on the other hand is much harder to deal with. Complete failure of the steering system (not just power steering) can happen on a traditional vehicle but I have never actually witnessed it.