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Comment by polarix | Hacker News Reader

It's not copyright itself that is the blight... it's the seemingly endless extension of it. Copyright will always be extended far enough to keep Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse cartoon) copyrighted, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out.

The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.ht...

Good thing about karma. I've brought my kids up telling them the evils of Disney and their harm to society. Suck it Walt!

No ABC, ESPN, Pixar or Disney Channel? Or Star Wars? I'll be impressed if you can keep that up!

Don't forget about The Muppets!

Disney buying something is not the same as Disney creating something.

And where did you get the word 'no'? Talking about the bad things a company has done is not an automatic boycott.

It seems to me that endless copyrights, or perhaps copyrights that last until the death of the creator, are the only logical extensions of having any copyrights at all. If "artists deserve to be paid for their work," and "copyrights are the only way to make sure artists get paid for their work," then why should the artist stop deserving to get paid after some arbitrary number of years?

Maybe because most works generate revenue, if at all, in the few years immediately following first publication, so a period based off that is all that's necessary to encourage creation? Maybe because if a copyright holder has a family and dies 6 months after creation of the work it seems wrong to prevent the family from profiting off the work? Maybe because when limits on periods are required in the law there is often no absolute reason to prefer one of several good candidate periods over another, so the ultimate decision is always in some sense arbitrary?

Note that in the U.S. patents are generally granted for a period of 20 years. Why do copyrightable works require or justify more?

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