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~Mail follows today's post.~
Abandoned Intellectual Property. I read a piece on this subject at OSOpinion over the weekend, and I've been thinking about it ever since. There are, of course, a lot of people calling for abolition of copyright or radical changes. This is, believe it or not, one of the tamer proposals I've read.
I'm definitely of two minds on this one. Take my first ever publication for money, in 1991. Compute Magazine, before Bob Guccione had managed to totally ram it into the ground, opted to buy my spring break project I collaborated on with a friend. We were writing a video game for the Commodore 64 and 128 and we were getting tired of trying to draw the title screen manually with graphics commands (bad enough on the 128 which had Basic commands to do such things, but on the 64 you were talking peeks and pokes all over the place--someone really should have written this thing back in 1982!) so we wrote a program to do the work for us. You loaded the sprites, moved 'em around, hit a key, and it gave you the Basic code to re-create the screen, suitable for inclusion in your program. We never finished the game, but we got a cool $350 and international recognition (OK, so it was a dwindling audience, but how many high school kids can say they're published authors at age 16?).
Now, the problem. General Media whittled Compute down until it was basically just another PC mag, abandoning the multiplatform support that made it so great (I read about my beloved Commie 8-bits but still got the opportunity to learn about Macs, Amigas and PCs--what could be better?), market share continued to dwindle, and eventually Guccione and GM sold out to Ziff-Davis, who fulfilled your subscription with a choice of mags (I remember I opted for PC/Computing). So the copyright went to Ziff-Davis, who never did anything with the old Compute stuff. A few years later, Ziff-Davis fell on hard times and eventually hacked itself up into multiple pieces. Who owns the old Compute stuff now? I have no idea. The copyrights are still valid and enforcable. I seriously doubt if anyone cares anymore whether you have the Nov. 1991 issue of Compute if you're running MOB Mover on your 64/128 or emulator, but where do you go for permission?
The same goes for a lot of old software. Sure, it's obsolete but it's useful to someone. A 68020-based Mac would be useful to someone if they could get software for it. But unless the original owner still has his/her copies of WriteNow, Aldus SuperPaint and Aldus Persuasion (just to name a few desirable but no-longer-marketable abandoned titles) to give you, you're out of luck. Maybe you can get lucky and find some 1995 era software to run on it, but it'll still be a dog of a computer.
But do we have an unalienable right to abandoned intellectual property, free of charge? Sure, I want the recordings Ric Ocasek made with his bands before The Cars. A lot of people want to get their hands on that stuff, but Ocasek's not comfortable with that work. Having published some things that I regret, I can sympathize with the guy. I like how copyright law condemns that stuff to obscurity for a time. (Hopefully it'd be obscure in the public domain too because it's not very good, but limiting the number of copies that can exist clinches it.)
Obscurity doesn't mean no one is exploited by stealing it. I can't put it any better than Jerry Pournelle did.
I don't like my inability to walk into record stores and buy Seven Red Seven's Shelter or Pale Divine's Straight to Goodbye or The Caulfields' Whirligig, but I couldn't easily buy them in 1991 when they were still in print either. But things like that aren't impossible to obtain: That's what eBay and Half.com are for.
For the majority of the United States' existence, copyright law was 26 years, renewable for another 26. This seems to me a reasonable compromise. Those who produce content can still make a living, and if it's no longer commercially viable 26 years later, it's freely available. If it's still viable, the author gets another 26-year-ride. And Congress could sweeten the deal by offering tax write-offs for the premature release of copyrighted material into the public domain, which would offer a neat solution to the "But by 2019, nobody would want WriteNow anymore!" problem. Reverting to this older, simpler law also solves the "work for hire" problem that exploits musicians and some authors.
All around, this scenario is certainly more desirable for a greater number of people than the present one.
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