Full MagicWB

[Plaz]

Thankfully  the patent protection at that time expired after a modest number of years.

Thankfully patents are inforced for only 20 years. (21 possibly adding in a provisional patent application). U.S. Copyrights on the other hand have been extented to what I think is a ludicris amount of time. Life of the author plus 70 years if I recall accurately.

If I were allowed to set the rules, the length would be similar to a patent. More like 20-25 years. Then the origianal author (or current owner of the rights if sold by the original author) would have the ability to extend the copyright say... every 10 years. If the rights owner fails to reapply, the work goes to public domain. The copyright and the right to extent would of course expire along with the author if he hadn't sold the rights to some one else.

The humble opinion of one who holds a few copyrights myself.

Plaz

[Plaz]

I'd like to see the law of copyrights re-written such that the author or holder had exclusive rights for the traditional first 14 years and possibly a 7 year renewal

There would need to be some study/compromise here. Many authors benifit from their works for many years. (i.e. song writters, novelist) You would find it hard to gain supoort to pass a new law that essentially changes thier potential income from lifetime to some thing far less. A 7 year extention term sounds good, but I'd still give them the oportunity to renew that more than once. But at renewal time.... "if you snooze, you loose".

Maybe as an added stipulation to an extention, you would have to show there is a certain level of active promotion/development and/or commercial activity to the copyright. Just renewing it to bury would not qualify.

Plaz

[Plaz]

Does software actually qualify for Copyright protections?

Yes, in many counties but not all. After all writting code is similar to writting a book or poem. What confounds most of us is that they also can qualify for patents. A patent makes no sense to me. It's like allowing some one to patent and "own" parts of a spoken language.

If they want to go that route, shouldn't all code written in C belong to the author of the C language? Same for C++, fortran, cobol.... How is it that Microsoft (and others) hold patents on code written in a language they don't own? I think they are looking ahead though and that's why they wrote their own language C#. Now they can own the language and all the code you write with it. Clever plan.

Plaz