Semi-OT: Congress about to limit artists' copyright rights

[Arthur Pemberton]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Billy Crook <billycrook at 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.


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