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To: Neil Booth who wrote (43799)	6/11/2001 10:13:28 AM
From: dale_laroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

>The only reason he does is a by-product of copyright law, whose reason for existence is explicitly not to compensate the producer, but to provide more for the public (look at your US Supreme Court judgements / Constitution if you don't believe me).< The problem that I have is with the government granting copyrights to corporations. The duration of copyrights has been defined in terms of the life of the creator. Corporations are not alive and therefore should not be granted copyright protection for anything. This is not to say that corporations should not be granted any form of IP protection, but it should be a special form of protection with a more suitable period of coverage. Unfortunately, this change is unlikely to occur even if the courts were to mandate it. I remember in the early 80s when companies, such as MS, were attempting to enforce copyright and patent protection of software. The courts ruled that neither copyright nor patent law was not applicable and charged Congress with defining a new body of IP law specifically for software. Instead of doing as charged by The Supreme Court, Congress simply explicitly extended both copyright and patent protection to software. The proper next course of action would have been for The Supreme Court to have thrown out the first case covered by this new legislation, and reiterated that Congress was to define a new body of IP law explicitly for software, perhaps transferring other bodies of previously covered IP, such as motion pictures, into this new category. The main determinate of which IP should be covered by the new body of legislation would be potential for control of technology through exercise of control of IP covered. For example, since the motion picture industy is able to control whether new technology, such as the LaserDisc format, lives or dies through their choice to either support or not support the new technology, motion pictures should be covered by the new body of IP law, rather than copyright. And, since the potential impact on technological progress was the reason for the shorter duration of patent law versus copyright law, this link to technological progress would dictate that the duration of the new IP protection would be appropriately reduced versus copyright protection.

To: Neil Booth who wrote (43799)	6/11/2001 10:18:39 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Neil, OT, You are jumping all over the place, but let's just say that there is a programmer who writes a program, and by selling one, he will still be homeless, but fed, by selling 2, his children can be fed 2, by selling 3, they can have home etc. How do you know that by stealing someone's work by copying his software, you are shortchanging a huge corporation of a few bucks in earnings, or if you are stealing food from someone's table? If a programmer states that the software is not to be copied without authorization, doing so is the same as stealing apple from a grocery store. Joe