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Here's an article talking about how copyrights on games are too long, and
public domain should come sooner for some works:

== Games should be public domain sooner ==
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/03/editorial-why-games-should-enter-the-public-domain/
 * has some good points, but lots of straw-men as well, selectively answering only the 'dumb' opposition

Here's a response that is more nuanced:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140206/07190726113/rps-takes-critics-idea-that-games-should-eventually-enter-public-domain.shtml

== Statute of Anne, the original copyright law ==
Put something here about the original copyright law.

Mason Wheeler says:

You're ignoring the relevant facts here, attempting to twist history to fit a
harmful ideology. Yes, after they lost their monopoly/censorship regime, the
Stationers attempted various bills to renew it, but as your historian notes,
every one of them was unsuccessful.

The Statute of Anne was passed in 1709, 2 years after the last of the
unsuccessful Stationers' bills was introduced, and it was not a way to restore
the stationers' monopoly, but a way to guard authors against the abuses that
had sprung up in the power vacuum that resulted when the monopoly fell.
Attempts to equate copyright with the Stationers' monopoly are both dishonest
and harmful to the goal of positive copyright reform, so I wish you wouldn't
persist in it.

----
Richard says:

The idea that copyright went initially to an author was a bit of spin by the
stationers to get a bill passed. It created a right that could be transfered to
the stationers, once again giving them control over producing copies. The
problem that copyright solved was avoidance of competition on a single title in
an industry that had to use batch production. This required that a printer
estimate the volume of sales before printing copies of a book and the printer
produce the estimated number of book before selling a single copy.If somebody
else came into the market with the same title, the result was often that both
printers were left with a large number of unsold copies. That is at the level
of a single title, competition in producing copies was disastrous for the
competing parties. The control over who got to print a title was a beneficial
side effect of imprimatur. When imprimatur was abolished, the stationers made
several attempts to restore it in a milder form as a printers right, and when
they realized that parliament was not going to give them this right they came
up with the idea of creating an authors right, which could be transferred to
them by contract.

Then, as now, "think of the starving author, artist, musician" is the cry of
those who would control their works for their own profit.

----
Pragmatic writes:

With respect, Mason, it's true that copyright began as a censorship tool. See
this link for details:
http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/commentary/uk_1557/uk_1557_com_972007121517.html

It's not just copyright that was used for censorship, but it was an essential
tool. See also http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=41

The idea was to only let "registered journalists" publish anything and light
everyone else on fire if they dissented.


== Lord Camden quote ==
Here's a quote apparently from the origin of copyright:

Anyway, I think it best to quote Lord Camden in his 1774 Judgement:

If there be any thing in the world common to all mankind, science and
literature are in their nature publici juris, and they ought to be free and
general as air or water. They forget their Creator as well as their
fellow-creatures who wish to monopolise his noblest gifts and greatest
benefits. Why did we enter into society at all, but to enlighten one another's
minds, and improve our faculties for the common welfare of the species? Those
great men, those favoured mortals, those sublime spirits, who share that ray of
divinity which we call genius, are intrusted by Providence with the delegated
power of imparting to their fellow-creatures that instruction which Heaven
meant for universal benefit: they must not be niggards to the world, or hoard
up for themselves the common stock. We know what was the punishment of him who
hid his talent; and Providence has taken care that there shall not be wanting
the noblest motives and incentives for men of genius to communicate to the
world the truths and discoveries, which are nothing if uncommunicated.
Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner; to be enjoyed it must be
communicated: scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter. Glory is the
reward of science; and those who deserve it scorn all meaner views. I speak not
of the scribblers for bread, who tease the world with their wretched
productions; fourteen years is too long a period for their perishable trash. It
was not for gain that Bacon, Newton, Milton, Locke, instructed and delighted
the world. When the bookseller offered Milton five pounds for his PARADISE
LOST, he did not reject the offer and commit his piece to the flames, nor did
he accept the miserable pittance as the reward of his labours; he knew that the
real price of his work was immortality, and that posterity would pay it. Some
authors are as careless of profit as others are rapacious of it, and in what a
situation would the public be with regard to literature if there were no means
of compelling a second impression of a useful work! All our learning would be
locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and Lintots of the age, who could set
what price upon it their avarice demands, till the whole public would become as
much their slaves as their own wretched hackney compilers.

----

== Both Sides ==
Here's a nice argument on both sides of the issue:
----
gwathdring says:

Sunjumper brings up a very important point, which I'm going to use as a spring
board.

The instances where creative works continue to be profitable after long periods
of time and would suffer substantially from people copying what it does well
and riding the bandwagon are exceptions. This whole line of argument, in my
view, suffers from the delusion that in America causes us to believe we have to
preserve people's path to unfettered fortune just in case one of us common folk
becomes Andrew Carnegie all of a sudden. Most authors are not J.K. Rowling. We
should not design our system primarily to protect J.K. Rowling because what
that ends up doing is protect the publisher and harm the creative industry
until such a time as another J.K. Rowling comes along in which case it is
protecting one sodding solitary person at the expense of restricting the many.
Rinse and repeat. That's just so backwards to me. Why do we feel the need to
expend such energy to protect our more fortunate few when we could instead
design realistic legislation that protected the whole system better rather than
just it's moguls and magnates? Why must the middle class always protect the
upper crust on the off chance that some day they get there? It's the same damn
thing and it's only somewhat less frustrating in economic policy surrounding
art than in economic policy surrounding everything else.

Because that's the other thing: copyright is economic policy. We should think
of it as such, not as some noble quest for the preservation of ideas. But I
suppose even if we thought of it that way, it would still be designed utterly
wrongly since currently it's designed to protect the profits of the few rather
than the ideas of the many and inventive.

Finally, let's return to J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Myer. Tell me - can you
honestly say that their ideas have not been borrowed and bungled and stolen and
copy-pasted and re-issued? Their band-wagons not thoroughly overwhelmed so as
to proceed down the bath at a mere crawl making dangerous creaking and buckling
noises as it goes? Can you honestly say that copyright has prevented other
people from profiting from their ideas? You cannot. So what *has* it done than?
It hasn't preserved their idea; it hasn't kept other people from writing Teen
Paranormal Romance so furiously following the Twilight extravaganza that it has
become a whole damn genre shelf in Barnes and Nobles. It hasn't crippled
creativity in the industry nor has it preserved ownership and sanctity of the
originator's ideas. But has it protected the originator's profits? Well, that's
a difficult question with cultural works - is Stephanie Meyer the originator?
How original was her work? How much of it was hers? What did *she* legally
steal as her many follow-alongs legally stole from her? What did she take
without technically copying? Who's work did she lean on? Whose advice did she
take without more than an acknowledgment page mention if even that returned
them? Further, has she not already been justly compensated? Has not her
published raked in enough cold hard cash such that even she will never see a
pittance in comparison? Has financial justice not already been done?

Consider how copyright is used. Oh, no! I used the word "Twilight" in my title
for "Twilight Haze," a book about werewolves forming a college fraternity at
the University of Washington in Seattle. Poor Stephanie Meyer and Stephanie
Meyer's publisher, they just must sue for me to cease and desist this travesty
never mind the shelf in Barnes and Nobles filled with thousand more flagrant
copies that avoid using this phrase, that name. That's perhaps a bad example
because with enough money I could probably win that one - but you get the idea.
You've heard those cases. You've heard of those mass-mailings, those C&Ds,
those desperate attempts to preserve a monopoly even against the least
threatening targets. All this in the name of protecting some fortunate and
extravagantly successful creator's right to profit *decades* after their death
which in turn came *decades* after they passed out of any danger of losing
their precious window of opportunity to profit either because they succeeded
and made it big or because their work had fallen into obscurity. Tolkien is
long dead, but his progeny continue to man-handle his licenses and rights and
keep a firm hold on his ideas which, while close to my heart, are hardly
representative of particularly profound originality - rather they are
representative of particularly profound creative *effort* and *labor,* effort
and labor that - duly compensated or not, can no longer be compensated seeing as
the fellow is tone dead. We need not preserve the profitability of his damn
corpse as though he created something so precious and unique and fundamentally
his own it needs must be encased in the creative and financial equivalent of
museum glass, trotted out only when the curators need to make a quick buck.

----

== facets of 'IP as property' ==

{{HTML(<UL>)}}

    ''I'm quite at a loss as to how to better explain the workman analogy,
unless you think his turning up to work each day to carry out brand new acts of
manual labour in different places is the equivalent of sitting still in a chair
while a shop the other side of the world sells another copy of your game.''

{{HTML(</ul>)}}

Well lets invert that analogy shall we?

Since you posit that "a plumber demanding a fee every time you use the tap he
installed in 1992"; is unreasonable, how about a developer or publisher is only
allowed to charge for one copy of their game? I mean they only made one game,
seems unreasonable for them to be allowed to charge multiple people for
multiple copies of the game right?

Good luck finding one person to pay for that one copy of the game when
development costs run to hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds.  I
suspect if any creative industries worked in this way, none of them would exist
beyond the purvey of enthusiastic amateurs.


== Happy Birthday song info ==

http://freeculture.org/blog/2010/10/21/good-morning-to-happy-birthday-for-all/

[[file:Copyright-and-the-worlds-most-popular-song.pdf]]