 |
 |
 |
|
distinctions applied
Amy Wohl has a posted an brief note on the question of "How Long should a SW copyright last?" Near the end of the not occur the following words: "I believe that the creators of Intellectual Property should be free to decide what its use should be." It is clear from the context, though, that what she means is that authors should be free to decide how their works should be used, which is not the same thing at all. This is where the distinctions that I mentioned in an earlier post can be useful. One must distinguish between a work and its copyright. The "intellectual property", if it exists, is the copyright, not the work. The author created the work, but not the copyright; it is the law that creates the copyright; it is Congress, acting in theory on behalf of the public, that creates the law. Hence in theory, it is the public that is ultimately the creator of the "intellectual property", that is, the copyright. Hence Amy Wohl's words are true, but not in the way that she meant. The public is the grantor of copyrights to authors in order to encourage them to enlarge the public domain; and it is the public (in theory) that decides what the copyright's limits are. Hence Amy's calculus is a little off here: I first saw early attempts at Voice Recognition in 1974. The first useful commercial applications surfaced (sort of) in the mid to late eighties. The first time we could take these products to a broader market occurred when PC's became big enough and cheap enough to be a platform for real time processing of reasonably accurate voice recognition. It took 20 years to get from one end of that process to another and nearly ten years later we're still just approaching the "mainstream" market if by this she means to imply that software copyrights should last at least thirty years. In any case, here the distinction between means and ends comes into play. The means are limited monopoly privileges; the ends are the enlargement of the public domain. So the question is not "how long was it from the time the first attempts at Voice Recognition were made to the time that commercial products could be marketed ?" though the answer to this question might be useful at a later stage of the calculation. The first question is " Does a term of N years give us more voice recognition software than a term of N-10 or N-20 would? and does it give us more by enough of a margin to make it worth enduring the additional 10 or 20 years ?" In the case of the life+70/95-year term created by the CTEA, the answer is pretty clear: we get nothing, or hardly anything, more from the 95 years than we would have gotten from the 75 year term.
|
