Darren New wrote:
> John VanSickle wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>> John VanSickle wrote:
>>>> In any event, work-for-hire agreements would be replaced by 
>>>> agreements under which the payee got the first option for licensing.
>>>
>>> Yet someone complained about patents, and that's 100% exactly how 
>>> patents work, so I'm not sure what the benefit would be.
>>
>> Under the current rules, the IP belongs to the employer for the life 
>> of the IP.
> 
> What country are you talking about?  Patents are owned by the inventor 
> and licensed to the employer. A corporation is *unable* to patent anything.
> 
>  > Following the US Constitution would make this arrangement
>> unenforceable, because the law could recognize only the creator's 
>> ownership, and nobody else's.
> 
> It already does.
> 
>> Granted, the employer could require lifetime licensing as a condition 
>> of employment,
> 
> That's exactly how it works.
> 
>  > but at least if the employer goes bankrupt, the creator
>> would retain the right to his work, instead of the IP going to some 
>> third party.
> 
> Um, no. The license is an asset of the bankrupt company.
> 
> 
> I take it you've never patented anything?
> 

He's confusing IP and "patent". IP is more like trademark. A company can 
"trademark", or otherwise maintain ownership, indefinitely, under 
current law, since it has to be explicitly given to public use to 
override this. Originally such "IP" protections only extended for a set 
number of years, which where actually less than patents, and one had to 
register them as something worth your time to protect. You could 
*extend* that protection, if you re-registered it within the allowed 
time frame. Probably the 60s-70s, or so, companies, including Disney, 
successfully argued that some things like Mickey Mouse, where IP that 
where central to their business, and, according to them, it was 
unreasonable to require them to re-register such things, to maintain 
their ownership and sole right to use them, especially after the 
original creator(s) where gone. Morons in the government, looking at 
business, rather than the end result of such a change, decided that, 
"Yes, this is a good point, so lets extend the rule for the life of the 
owner.", then later, "Well, if the owner is a company, lets extend it to 
the life of the company.", and then, "Well, if a company fails, then 
someone is likely to buy the assets, so lets extend the rights to 
include 'whom ever buys the IP'", even if the original creator of it, 
the company that they ran, and even the product itself no longer exist, 
in any legitimate sense. About 90% of everything "ever" produced by 
Hollywood in the early years is either lost, or sitting in some studies 
warehouse, rotting into oblivion, because of this change. The arguments 
by the companies range from "no one wants to see those old films", to, 
"we plan to remake them at some point, maybe", which contradicts the 
first contention entirely, and/or, "if it become a public work, we can't 
make more money off it, by re-releasing it, even though 200+ films rot 
past the point where we could possibly hope to do this at all every 
year, and we are re-releasing less than 0.001% of the ones we own, 
because, see excuse #1."

Imho, they should revoke this "a company has IP rights, and those rights 
are basically perpetual, and transferable.", and go back to having to 
***actually*** register the fracking stuff. You can't tell me it would 
be impossible for Disney to keep a list of everything they want to keep, 
  provide reasonable evidence that they are not just letting the 
material rot some place, and pass the list on to some agency once ever 
10 years, or something, saying, "This is the stuff you want to keep the 
IP going on." If they miss something, well then... too frakking bad. If 
it was ***so*** important, they wouldn't have missed it, and at least 
the public record of its existence is preserved, along with the ability 
to derive new works from it.

But, yeah. This issue is parallel too, but an entirely different issue 
than patents. Basically, if patent stupidities are the elephant in the 
living room, then IP issues are the rhino smashing plates in the kitchen 
and trying to trample the stove every time you light a burner to cook 
something derived from the few edible left overs in the fridge.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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