Neeum Zawan wrote:
>     To get to my point, when the copyright period is too long, then the 
> incentive to promote the arts is greatly reduced. If you have lifetime 
> copyright, then the person who produced a piece of art has a lot less 
> incentive to produce more pieces of art.

I think you might be ignoring the part where copyright pays for the work you 
already did.

Consider a computer program like Windows, or a mainstream movie, that 
requires hundreds of people working for years to write. One of the uses of 
copyright is to recover that money, because nobody would pay the full cost 
for the first copy.

>     Take Star Trek. It almost disappeared. The series were all dead, and 
> no movie had been made for what, 8 years?

I don't think 8 years is a long time.

>     In other words, the burden is on you to explain why they should be 
> allowed to benefit from it. Specifically, why do you even think there 
> should be copyright?

So that one piece of information that costs a great deal to be developed can 
have the cost of developing it recovered by spreading that cost amongst many 
buyers.

Now, once your cost is recovered, along with a reasonable profit (including 
a reasonable "interest-like" profit for risking the development in the first 
place), it would make sense to terminate that specific copyright. But it's 
hard to codify how much money you can make from an idea, so a limited period 
in which to regain your profits seems to be an OK alternative. Altho a "as 
long as you can make money on it" seems OK to me too, as long as you *do* 
make money on it.  Having it available continuously for sale would seem like 
it would satisfy the enrichment of culture to me.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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