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Re: Sunday, August 18, 2002
>BTW, fourteen years isn't enough. We haven't yet >recouped our investment on Frontier, and if fourteen >years was the standard for copyright, it would have >expired in April of this year. Two points: First, tough. Many texts and programmes have been written that did not make back their investment. The RIAA and MPAA claim that some 80% of new CDs and movies do not recover their investment. If one of Shakespeare's plays didn't make money, should it be removed from the public domain? How about all of van Gogh's paintings? Many items in other fields of endeavour are not guaranteed profit. You can always change your business plan. Second, if you publish a renewed book (e.g. an encyclopaedia or dictionary, I can't think of a good expression for this) then the copyright date is based upon the year of that edition. Thus, the Catholic Encyclopaedia of 1908 is the most recent edition to enter the public domain. Similarly, the most recently freed edition of Webster's was published in 1913 and 1911 is the corresponding date for the 11th edition of Britannica. While I believe that this is counterproductive, the law is what it is (c.f. Dickens). However, you could apply similar logic to software. When was version 1.0 of Frontier published? April 1988? Okay, in April 2002, version 1.0 enters the public domain. When was version 2 released? Add fourteen years to get the year of its entrance into the public domain. In addition to the copyright on the code, you also have a trademarque on the name, Frontier. Anybody can use the version 1.0 code but they cannot market it using your marque. I don't have a finished plan for this but there has to be an alternative to 75 years after you die (excepting of course that a corporation owns the code and corporations are like flesh-eating zombies. The earth keeps regurgitating them. When a given company fails, it's assets are acquired and the cycle begins anew. Incidentally, I'd like to know just what the most recently published book is that has naturally entered the public domain. I suspect that no book published subsequent to Edwardian times is available. If a different mindset is not applied to preparing these laws, the same will be said in a hundred years.
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