[Pax]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
I did NOT say hearing it once makes it mine. I said 40 years+ of ownership is excessive. This is the same extremist counter-argument that has driven people to ignore copyright altogether.

Until the suits develop some respect for the audience, and culture outside of corporate ownership, the audience and the culture are not going to respect the suits copyright claims.

So if you rent an apartment for 40+ years, you should own it by default?

If you get a room in the same hotel for vacation, every summer, for 40+ years, you shoudl own that room in the hotel?

Copyright isn't the problem. Big Business' abuse of copyright is.

The 70-years-after-death clause is so that an Author's work keeps supporting his or her children / other heirs. If I opened a hotel, and died, the hotel wouldn't suddenly stop giving my children, grandchildren, etc money. Would it?

Noone BUYS music. You -rent- it. If you buy a CD, that CD functions as a key for unlimited listening -- but you still don't OWN the music. If you buy sheet music, you pre-pay a lifetime's worth of rent to play the music ... but you still don't own the music itself.

Without laws protecting intellectual property, noone would ever see much reason to put the blood, sweat, and tears into creating much of anything ... and culturally, we'd be bankrupt.

Thanks, I don't want to live that way.

What needs to be done is, lower the price of CD's to a reasonable level; the recording companies need to stop gouging the public.

Blank CD media bought in ludicrous bulk must cost, what, maybe $0.10US a disc? Tops? Add in maybe $0.40US total for cover art / packaging issues. Up to $0.50US per disc.

If the producer and the store were each willing to take $2US, and another $2US for the artist, we're talking under $7 for the CD. Add in, oh, another $1US to cover costs of getting it from the distributor's warehouse, to the store itself. Look, about $8US for the CD ... but we're paying 2x and 3x that much right now, the difference almost entirely going into the pockets of the corporate types.

So. It's not copyright that's the problem; it's corporate greed.