22.6.06

What is copyright anyways, IP is so protracted it doesn't make sense anymore

Techdirt: Paramount Worried It Can't Compete With A Bunch Of Amateurs
There's something weird about copyright/trademark/patent law.

Trademark sort of makes sense: you can prevent other people trying to pretend to be you or your product.

Patent sort of makes sense: you can share a methodology for doing/creating something in order to further innovation while making people reimburse you (by licensing your methodology) for helping them to further their own innovation.

Copyright sort of makes sense: if you aren't in some way reimbursed (currently through licensing) for the content you generate, how will you afford to generate that content. Of course, the content is only worth generating if people are willing to reimburse you to generate it.

What has happened to all of these makes little to no sense. A script is like a recipe for a movie. I could see a patent covering a script. I can't see copyright covering the movie generated from a script. Just as a copyright wouldn't cover cookies generated by a recipe. Although I could see Trademark covering what you couldn't call those cookies. To my mind copyright could only cover the content itself, not a methodology for generating content. So usage of the movie without license would violate copyright, but usage of the script to generate content could only be accountable under patent law. [Of course possesion/reading/selling of the script would be a problem under copyright if the usage is unlicensed. But I would think that in order to obtain the protection of a patent in order to prevent others from generating a movie based on the script, one would have to put the "content" of the script in public domain.]


that's how i think the world should work, it would most likely simplify things.

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