rights vs preservation

[persia]

Legally, 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the earliest claimed filing date, the longer term applying.

So you would have to change intellectual property laws for your suggestion.  Good Luck.

[persia]

Intellectual property, copyright and trademark are three different things with three different laws attached to them.  IP expires in 17 years, it is the right to the actual ideas.  It can be renewed by making a significant advance in the IP.  This is why drug companies reformulate their drugs every 17 years, it's also why there was an AmigaDos 4.0 to begin with.

Trademarks can be renewed, so long as the company is still in business.  Amiga and AmigaDos are trademarks.  If they are abandoned they cease to be trademarks.


Copyright is trickier, generally it's Berne COnvention, 50 years after the death of the author, but some contries, such as the US and the EU have extended it.  Here in Oz, for example, Waltzing Matilda is a public domain song, in the US it is not.

Now how do you handle software?  Generally software that hasn't been updated in six years is worthless.  I have nothing on my Mac older than 2 years.  But suppose I wrote a program 10 years ago and decide now I want to update it?  SHouldn't I have the right to do so?  How do you change copyright on software without changing copyright everywhere and who determines what's out of copyright?

[persia]

A clearing house that checked with owners of programs and provided copies of programs that the authors agreed to allow distributed would be fine.  The issue here is that the owner of the IP has absolute rights when it comes to their software, yeah they can sit on it if they want, but you could provide a site for owners who don't.