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[Jonnyram]

I saw someone playing with their Palm PC today and I thought, "Hell if this were 100% perfect emulation and ran smoothly on a Palm PC, I'd pick up one of those babies straight away." How nice it would be to not have to swap carts all the time and have useful extra functionality at my fingertips.

 

[DDayton]

That's relevant because.....? Oh right, because if I haven't created anything, I'm just a have-not who wants s--- for free. . . And just fyi, I've worked on quite a few creative works that have been publicly released, both personal, artistic, and commercial. In fact, I just donated a work of $5000 to a museum.

Sorry if I sounded a bit brusque there, I wasn't really meaning to be. It's just been my experience that the folks most pushing for extreme limitations to copyright law are the ones who don't produce unique creative content themselves. I take issue with the concept that a copyright owner shouldn't be allowed to fully control their own works, and many folks who push for "radically limiting" the copyright seem to have this concept that the public should have full control over all creative works, rather than the authors. I'm quite in favor of "live plus ___ years", as it allows the author and his or her family to control the work. As far as potential loss goes, all written works are safeguarded via the Library of Congress; we just need to extend the LoC's holdings to all other forms of media.

A creative work belongs to the author, NOT to society as a whole. It may be written FOR society, and it may be GIVEN to society (or taken after a period of time), but I can't agree that "As soon as humanity loses out because of those 'rights,' they should be revoked", if only because that sounds less like "archiving history for later generations" and more like "how DARE those authors claim ownership to their own work!"

Now, I do agree that there needs to be reform on corporate copyright holdings; I see no reason to extend the same rights to them as to an individual (at least as far as length goes).

(I must ask... what do you think of Twain's article on copyright length versus property rights?)