On 2/3/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd
like to see the US make fair
use more restrictive - although frankly it probably wouldn't matter
all that much in my daily life.
But making it more clear when the answer is "No." That'd be
tremendously helpful to Wikipedia, in that it'd resolve a lot of
conflict, and I really don't see how it'd hurt anything.
Another interesting possibility would be a use-it-or-lose-it provision.
If there has been no properly authorized publication of a copright work
in the last 10 years, any reprinting is fair use.
At the very least a liberal application of adverse possession and
prescriptive easements to copyright would be nice. After all, if
"intellectual property" really is "property", one should have to
actively defend the property in order to keep it.
This makes fair use the intellectual counterpart to squatters' rights. ;-)
One point that I have sometimes raised is that a property rights vest in
a person (which can include a corporation or a trust). Unless somebody
exists to own the rights there can be no copyrights. If a corporation
owns certain copyrights, then goes bankrupt and the copyrights (which
may have already been long forgotten) are not transferred in the
bankruptcy proceedings, there is a strong argument for saying that the
copyrights went into the public domain at the time of bankruptcy.
Similarly, if a jurisdiction specifies only that copyrights are passed
on to children and granchildren of the author, rather than according to
rules of succession, one cannot read into that that cousins or nephews
could gain those rights.
Ec