Re: Video from demo

Posted by Laszlo on Apr 24, 2007

Nice video. Gets me all pumped up for Okoumefest. Love that endless boat.

As far as copyright goes, the Founders' original intent was to stimulate innovation and ideas, and to reward the authors and innovators for a generation or so. Then the works were supposed to pass into public domain for the unlimited use of all Americans. It was never meant to turn into an endless revenue stream for big corporations which had nothing to do with the original innovation. But through the power of legalized bribery known as lobbying, copyrights have been getting retroactively extended to the point where no copyrights have expired since the 1930s. Did anyone else notice the frantic bribing going on when Mickey Mouse was supposed to pass into the public domain a few years ago?

This has had a deletorious effect on our society by denying non-profit choral groups the free use of any music written after the Great Depression, stifling creativity based on derivatives of others' works (which is how it has always worked, no innovator works in a vacuum) and allowing big corporations to dictate what music and literature we can be allowed to enjoy. One thing I find especially galling is when a company owns the copyright for an out-of-print work, won't reprint it in spite of numerous request, but then vigorously prosecutes anyone else who attempts to share existing copies.

The long and short of this rant is that the current copyright system is not what the nation's founders intended, it's been perverted by greedy corporations and it should be changed. Write your legislators to put copyright terms back to reasonable lengths and to put a use-it-or-lose-it clause into the law, and in the meantime practice civil disobedience by ignoring copyrights that are more 20 years old.

Or just go paddling.

Attaboy Peter.

Laszlo

In Response to: Re: Video from demo by Andrew on Apr 23, 2007

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