18 May
2008
18 May
'08
11:54 a.m.
Of course your comments are all US-based.
I'm in Canada, and thankfully things are still a bit different here.
We're even allowed to copy things - as long as they're for personal use,
that's a major difference.
Hopefully, some day, govt's will realize making things too draconian will only make it
worse and drive everyone underground.
Dan.
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Date: Sun, 18 May 2008 11:46:49 -0700
From: eric at brouhaha.com
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: RE: anyone scans/PDFs of the DEC (VMS) "grey wall" ?
Dan wrote:
_________________________________________________________________
copyrights dont last forever. stuff from the 70s
should be public domain
by now.
Sorry, Dan, but that's very nearly as wrong about copyright as it is
possible to be.
In the US, for all practical purposes, copyrights on anything created after
1922 do last forever. The official story is that they last for the life
of the author plus 70 years [*], but in practice every few years Disney
et al. get Congress to pass a new law to extend it further.
There's also a ratcheting up affect. The copyright interest in the
US say "we've got to catch up with the rest of the world", and increase
the US copyright term beyond what some other country has. Then the
corporations in that country tell their legislature that they have to
"catch up" with the US, and they increase theirs beyond ours, and
then...
As you may be aware, there is very little computer software and
documentation from 1922 and earlier that is now in the public
domain.
whatever happened to fair use in this screwed up
world?
Fair use? Why should the copyright owners let us have fair use? That
won't help their profits any. We only get fair use to the extent that
Disney et al. haven't yet convinced Congress and the courts to take it
away from us.
Eric
[*] For works of corporate authorship, the shorter of 95 years from
publication or 120 years from creation.