[Coco] Re: [Color Computer] Fw: Copyright

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 09 July 2005 16:02, James the Animal Tamer wrote:
>> The key word is innovation.  Now, if anyone writes a story
>
>involving a
>
>> mouse, Disney will exert sufficient pressure to quash the work,
>> and another promiseing author of childrens books or such will be
>
>flipping
>
>> burgers at McD's.
>
>Dunno.  I liked Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH (although the
> movie based on it had a suck-big-time ending).
>
>> Mickey Mouse should have reverted to the public domain 40 years
>
>ago.
>
>I'd disagree with you here.  I think the intellectual property that
>is actively being used by the original owner or heir should be
>retained by the owner or heir (so, no, I am not planning on writing
> a Winnie The Pooh book, and I don't think you should be either).

I'm at best ambivalent on that.  The founding fathers did, I think, 
know what they were doing and all we've done since is screw it up.

>What I'd like is for there to be a reasonable "if it's been out of
>print for x years, it should become public domain" law.

I'm highly in favor of an out of print, its public domain law.  With a 
1 year limit, or less if the publisher has already declined to meet 
the demand in a hard copy communication.  That way if Addison-Weseley 
doesn't want to redo a production run, its fair game long before the 
contained information is out of date.  And I keep picking on A-W 
because they were the publisher of the amigados manuals, and when 
they were out of print, it was tough nouggies folks.  But they damned 
sure made it clear that they would prosecute to the fullest extent of 
the law, any violations of "their" copyright.  They could in fact, 
have sold 3-5 production runs the same size as the first.  I have a 
set of them sitting here, and I've turned down 3x what I paid back 
when they included the equally copyrighted kickstart rom set.

>Of course, I'm biased.  I have copyrighted software up for download
>on my website, some of which I don't have permission for.

:-)  Yes, I've been in that boat too, finding some of my amiga stuff 
where I least expected it.  Do I care now?  No, my machine died.  
There is no use of the very usefull software I co-wrote for it dying 
with my machine.  I'm referring of course to EzCron, because amigados 
didn't have a cron-like utility.  Full gui interface, . double ought 
zero cpu useage.  A copy of that cron is still doing much of the leg 
work in putting the news stories up on our web page at 
<http:www.wdtv.com>, and has been since 1997.

Since then I've also given several registered users of EzHome 
permission to pass that usefull utility along to anyone who wants it.  
The wayback machine even has copies of our web page at the time, but 
unforch, the download links aren't good.  Sad...

I practice what I preach.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.35% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.


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