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It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.
But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.
Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:40AM
The original term of copyright was 14 years in the USA.
If you were still alive after that[1], you could apply for one more 14-year term of exclusivity.
After that, your stuff went into the public domain.
The last item in that list is the only thing that happened automatically.
It is now easier than ever to produce and distribute works, yet the term of copyright keeps getting longer, not shorter.
The length of patent protection is in the same ballpark as the Founding Fathers intended.
Now, if we can get the patent clerks to stop approving every damned thing put in front of them.
[1] This was in an era when the extent of medical "science" resulted in George Washington being bled to death by his "doctor" as a "treatment".
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:51AM
This is an era when the extent of medical "science" results in people being medicated to death by their "doctors salesperson" as a "cure". ;)
Other treatments can also be put into questioning as there is a gatekeeper with vested interests. The absolute lack of it would of course result in mayhem but it doesn't take away the fact there is interests that are not to the patients best interest.