On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
Hold up...
It doesn't sound unfair to me at all that you should have to pay some fee to register your work in order to extort a fee out of someone else for using the same work down the road. The fees shouldn't be 'excessive', but what does 'excessive' even mean today.
It's completely fair that you have to pay to register patents and trademarks today. It's fair because you are investing in the profitability of your innovation. Copyrights should be the same. How *fair* do you think it is that you are able today, to spend hundreds of hours on some work only to discover (after you've spent thousands, millions of your own money) to bring your idea to market, that there was some prior work with copyright that you had NO WAY to know about, but yet now, all your time, and all your money is in vain. Copyright law is supposed to *promote* innovation. Not discourage it. It is entirely unreasonable and impossible to expect all new inventors to just "know" about every secret copyright out there. At very least there should be a single registry one could search, and there will be some cost to run such a registry. It can either be paid for out of your taxes, or by the people who profit from it. The latter is obviously more fair.
Whatever some silly fee costs, it will only be "expensive" for those (think companies) that want to register millions of them to set up "intellectual property" landmines. And even if it is expensive today, wait another couple years until you're riding a bicycle because you can't afford gas, and then tell me what's expensive.
Seems the opposite. Individual/unsigned artists are more likely to find the fees expensive. Just like the patent system.