Are you inferring that since they let you use a mobile device that they think they're secure?

This is the same group of organizations that will allow you to withdraw cash if you know a four digit code that hasn't been changed in the account holder's entire lifetime. The same group of organizations that will allow you to ACH transfer funds from an account because you know the account number and routing number, which are both on every check they hand out.

BTW, none of the things in the previous paragraph are enough to secure a transfer of funds. Banks always have additional assurances. They cash checks because they don't really cash them, they put them in holding status until they get confirmation from the other side. They allow ACH transfers because they know exactly who is performing them and have a lot of legal leverage to recoup any lost funds. They allow fishy (to a certain extent) credit card transactions because they charge enough interest to eat the losses. They allow teller withdrawals because they have cameras and the FBI will actually go after those who commit fraud.

90% of bank security is invisible to the public. It annoys me when people say "We can do this, my bank does it and they consider it secure." You almost certainly aren't doing what your bank does from a larger perspective.

-- because a person has unfettered access to the digital content for an extended period of time.

Here's the problem. It isn't just a word, it's the fact that the seller wants the buyer to assume that the period is "forever". In many cases, the actual period can't even be determined at the time of sale. It would have to be changed to something like "You are purchasing the right to view this media item until we decide to stop paying royalties for it. Also, you need to keep paying a monthly fee, or you will then lose access to anything purchased through this service. We make no guarantees that this period will even be long enough for you to finish watching it, but it may end up being for your entire lifetime. We also make no guarantees that the membership fee will remain the same price, or even that membership will be available. Good luck!"

Once the proper words are filled in, it will be obvious that the consumer isn't even aware what they are paying for... and that is worthy of a class action suit.

Are you referring to the president who humiliated himself and the US at Helsinki? The president who had a negotiation regarding the Ukraine war without including Ukraine? The president who admires Putin? That president?

Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.

Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.

My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.

There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.

Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.

If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.

This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")

No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.

Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.

It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.

But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.

I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?

So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.

No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.

Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.

Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.

No, that's fine. Remember, it's not just Hollywood that does that; everyone can and does. For example, the Wicked movie just came out, which is the film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel which came out in 1995, which in turn was a derivative work based on the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 which has been in the public domain since 1956. (Although Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, did put in a few elements from the still-copyrighted 1939 film, but little enough as to not matter -- mainly just the Witch's green skin)

This is all exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage: authors -- and songwriters, and performers, and filmmakers -- creating new works derived from older works just as much as we encourage them to create new original works. The main thing is to get more works created, of any kind -- sheer quantity is the only way to get more works of quality.

They're not hurting anyone.
Leave them alone.

Why does every business need a copy of my Social Security Number?

Nope. Most people, when they are "required" to use mixed case and special characters, do it in a way that can be easily brute forced with only a handful of extra attempts (1 = !, at = @, O = 0, etc.). The parts that preserve the difficulty of brute force are:

• 3. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords.
• 4. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a single character

• when evaluating password length.

• 9. Verifiers SHALL verify the entire submitted password (i.e., not truncate it).

Web site have been having it both ways for years: they have been telling us to make harder password, while simultaneously making it harder for us to do so. In some cases, passwords were truncated or forced to lower case before being hashes, making them much much weaker than it seemed they were. And then when a password is compromised, the user is blamed.

Don't mix up the actual strength if voluntarily using complex passwords with the perceived strength of forcing someone else to do so.

I would suggest that the iTunes Music Store and music and video streaming services are why you don't see much of this any more. Not only was it a bad look, and expensive (Joe Sixpack pirates are not going to be able to pay much, however big the judgment is), and not effective at stopping piracy, but it turns out that the best way to reduce piracy is to provide inexpensive alternatives since piracy is largely the result of market conditions.

Anyway, no need to take my word for this; here's an actual circuit court opinion from the Napster case:

Wasn't trying to, but if it helps, the penalties are equal across the board. Downloaders, being individuals, may feel it worse than an infringing business with greater assets, but whatcha gonna do.

I vaguely recall that it has survived such challenges, though I'll let you research it instead of doing more work for you. I see no likelihood that statutory damages for copyright infringement will be held unconstitutional in any respect.

The only purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of science by encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not have created and published, where those works are in the public domain as thoroughly as possible as rapidly as possible.

It would be nice if we could tailor it to each individual author down to the second and down to the bare minimum of rights, so that they are given the exact amount of incentive needed and not one iota more but that's impractical.

A year is plenty of time for many works -- a news article, for example, is only commercially relevant for somewhere between a day and a week, and the value of reprints or archival access isn't enough that it would not have been created and published if the term were short.

Anyway, I'm also not saying you only get one year. I'm saying you get a term of one year but can renew for another year, and another, etc. but in one-year increments. This is about as fine as we can reasonably chop up the time.

Authors -- presumably -- can be trusted to file their taxes every year, and to renew their car registration every year, and so forth. Annually filing a very simple form with a token payment (I'd be happy with $1; just not free) to renew a copyright is not burdensome. Especially if we're requiring registration as a strict formality.

The number of renewals might vary depending on the kind of work from zero (newspaper) to 15 or 20 (motion picture) based on how much incentive it tends to take for that sort of work to be created and published.

And if a copyright holder fails to renew timely when they could have the work enters the public domain all the sooner.