Understanding The problem of Copyright

[Kenny]

HappySqurriel said:

Kenny said:

I've known that copyight in the United States started at 14 years, but what that meant didn't really hit home for me until I realized that a system like this would mean Goldeneye 64 would enter the public domain in a few months' time.  Not only that, but every single game on the NES and SNES would also be in the public domain by now.  Unfortunately, reality dictates that cartoons from the 20s are still copyrighted, and will be for all time as long as Walt Disney successfully lobbies the government into extending the length of copyright every time Mickey Mouse comes close to entering the public domain.

But is 14 (or 25) years really unreasonable?

A company (like Disney or Nintendo) should be able to protect people from creating new works based on their IP with Trademarks, but after enough time has passed why is it wrong to let people have free access to this already created material? The company and its creators have turned massive profits already, and there is no legitimate argument that copying this material would cause any harm to the company (or the people who created the content).

To add to your point about harm (or lack thereof) to copyright holders:  With the advent of the internet, the speed at which we produce new ideas, as well as the rate at which they disseminate throughout the public, has increased drastically.  The flipside of that is that the time in which it takes for a copyrighted work to become irrelevant has undergone a corresponding decrease, in all but a handful of exceptional cases.  If anything, copyright terms should be getting shorter, not longer, to reflect the fact that society is speeding up.

Aside from Goldeneye 64, another good example is the Ultima series, a fantastic computer RPG series I grew up with; the works have almost completely faded into obscurity, and yet current copyright laws dictate that they will be under copyright until the late 21st century.  Society doesn't benefit from the copyright because they've forgotten about the series at large, and EA Games doesn't benefit because nobody is buying them anymore.  We have long since passed the point where copyright is good for the public in this case, seeing as EA has made all the money they're ever going to make on the games.