"Joona I Palaste" <pa*****@cc.hel sinki.fi> wrote in message
news:c0******** **@oravannahka. helsinki.fi...
CBFalconer <cb********@yah oo.com> scribbled the following: Joona I Palaste wrote:
... snip ...
The Disney corporation has been very dutiful in renewing its patents.
At least in the USA, "Mickey Mouse" will still belong to the Disney
corporation in 2400. That the same corporation made heaps of money
reusing children's faerytales whose own patents had expired makes this
quite ironic. Maybe those children's faerytales will soon be patented
by Disney and will require royalties to be expressed in any form?
Patents don't renew. Their purpose is to make techniques public,
in return for a limited period of exclusive use. Unlike
copyright.
Then it appears I have made a mix-up in terms. The Disney corporation
is constantly renewing the *copyright* of "Mickey Mouse". It'll still
be the copyright property of the Disney corporation in 2400. As will
all the classic children's faerytales.
Not according to current law. The renewal period may be longer than
you (and others) like, but it's still finite.
You're also confusing more than just the terms; you're confusing the
concepts that go with them:
-- A patent is granted for an *idea* that's recognized by people
skilled in the relevant art as being inventive. It covers all uses
of the idea, but for a relatively short term in recent centuries.
By democratizing the "letters patent" by which monarchs once handed
out monopolies, the USA and other nations have demonstrably stimulated
innovation in numerous fields. Patent successes vastly outnumber the
handful of patent abuses that we hear about from time to time.
-- A copyright covers an *expression*, whether it be words, music,
pictures, or performance. It grants to the creator the right to
control how the expression is copied and exploited by others. As
the value of intellectual property has grown, so has the useful
lifetime of the more successful expressions. For individuals, it
was recently extended from the creator's lifetime plus fifty years
to the creator's lifetime plus seventy years.
Some factoids:
-- Disney has no right to copyright old fairy tales. They're in the
public domain and beyond the acquisitive reach of -- even you.
-- Disney may have benefited from the public domain status of older
works, but so too did Shakespeare in many of his plays. And so
did Bernstein et al. by coopting the plot of Romeo and Juliet for
West Side Story. But all of the above borrowers also produced a
*unique expression of lasting value.* That, IMO, gives them some
right to benefit from their value added. (Why don't you start with
the version of Cinderella where the wicked step mother and step
sisters die ignominiously at her hand, once she nabs the prince?
Might make a good Saturday morning cartoon these days. You too can
become as rich as Disney Studios, if you make the right decisions.)
-- One of my son's school friends happens to be the grandson of
Hoagy Carmichael. Grandpa's music is still generating a good
royalty stream, and his grandson is thus still benefiting from
Hoagy's obvious talents. He's not some grasping cartel, just
another kid with an inheritance. Should we review all inheritances
and decide which ones are morally justified? Or does the evil
enter when you pass ownership to a Class C coporation?
FWIW, I've made my living generating intellectual property in the
form of software, textbooks, and science fiction. When I do it
right, I make a good living. When I do it wrong, I try a different
strategy. If there weren't a good fabric of IP laws, and adequate
cultural acceptance of those laws, I'd probably do better shingling
roofs. I have some objections to the application of patent law to
software, and to some of the "thought crime" aspects of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, and I'll campaign in my own small way to
have the laws improved. But in general, I have to applaud the
efforts of governments all over the world to give IP a chance to
retain its value.
P.J. Plauger
Dinkumware, Ltd.
http://www.dinkumware.com 
