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posted by LaminatorX on Friday April 24 2015, @02:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the useful-progress dept.

It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).

Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.

There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @03:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @03:11PM (#174681)

    This would not be great for free software. To make things symmetric the source code of proprietary software needs to be made available.

    Originally the pirate party proposed such a short copyright term, hence https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html [gnu.org]

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Friday April 24 2015, @03:18PM

    by Wootery (2341) on Friday April 24 2015, @03:18PM (#174685)

    14 years is still quite a long time, though. If you forked the Linux kernel of 14 years ago, you'd be so far behind the modern kernel that you'd surely be nuts not to just go with, say, FreeBSD.

    I don't think a 14 year copyright term would render copyleft totally ineffective. Things progress a long way in software, in 14 years.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @05:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @05:44PM (#174756)

    I don't see why. There is much 14 year old open source software that I would be interested in using, most software dates quickly, games are a bit of an exception, but there aren't many good open source games. And if anyone can make anything out of open source software that is 14 years old by closing it up and improving it, then good luck to them.

    And also, the source code to 14 year old code would be out of copyright along with the binaries, you'd just need to find a copy of it. I don't think it would be right to compel anyone to provide a copy of it though.

  • (Score: 2) by moondrake on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:53AM

    by moondrake (2658) on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:53AM (#175020)

    Software is a special case anyway. 14 years or 70 years+ do not matter much. Most 14 year old software is not that useful if it just comes as a binary.

    To fix this, copyright should only be awarded to software for which complete source code is submitted to a copyright office. After copyright expires, source code should be made available.
    This should have been implemented from the beginning actually. If you do not want to show the code (after a certain time to let you earn some $$), you are not worthy of a state given monopoly.

    The problem with binary software is that it limits how society can use it. You can adapt a Shakespeare play, but you cannot adapt a 20 year old version of wordperfect. Future inventors and developers therefore cannot profit from the works of the past, as they cannot see how it was done. The ability to interact with old hardware, the ability to read ancient file formats, clever algorithms to do things, etc are all lost because of this. It hampers progress and wastes money. We are doomed to reinvent the wheel all the time because of the stupidity and greed of a few people.

    GNU helps to address the problem, and perhaps it will eventually be the solution, but only if it manages to mostly kill the proprietary software industry. That would not have been been necessary if reasonable copyright terms with availability of software had been implemented from the start.