In Response To: Whoa, that's not what I said! (Flashman)
: No, no, no... without the protections granted by IP/copyright law, there's no
: incentive for people to go out and create things. These things exist to
: protect and encourage creativity, but my argument is that the protection
: granted to the original author is limited.
: We'd never get this one cleared up outside of a court case. Even then, people
: are always going to have different feelings about this.
No no no! There have been court cases. Lots of them. And your point of view summarizes the issue quite succinctly. You are right. That's the whole issue of copyright law.
In fact the CONSTITUTION MENTIONS IT! Bet you didn't know that . . .
CHECK THIS SHIT OUT:
ARTICLE 8, SECTION 8, CLAUSE 8 (talking about Congressional power):
"To PROMOTE [emphasis added] the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by secruing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
And that's the current Copyright Act of 1976, the law over copyrights passed by Congress -- it fits in this power.
And a lot of issues are muddled, but not this one. It is correct to think that copyrights encourage innovation rather than stifle it. The main faulty premise is that all these "evil corporations" own all this stuff and so are stepping on the little guy. This implies theft of dishonesty or disingenuity of some sort. But that's not the case. No one is "stealing" from anyone else when they get the copyright ownership of their employees' content. Believe me, I want to hate corporations too, but the fact is, if these employees weren't making all this copyrightable content in the course of their employment for those corporations, THE CONTENT WOULDN'T OTHERWISE GET MADE! That's the fact. Nobody can running 200 Xboxes in his friggin' basement doing multiplayer tests for his own homegrown Halo 2, you know what I'm saying? Damn commies.
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