http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie#Copyright_stat...
My take: Congress works for Disney. Why not law enforcement?
I do agree that labeling such acts as censorship is playing a game of semantics, but that is largely irrelevant. The larger picture here is that the (slyly named) PROTECT IP Act yields undue power to copyright holders, and that is not a good thing.
Agreed. IMO this PROTECT IP Act could have a major chilling effect. Oddly he writes: "This option has rightsholders spending the majority of the resources dedicated to detecting and removing pirated material from sites and struggling to find an acceptable new business model that can compete with free." What about site owners? If content-hosting cannot be a neutral tool, what will we be left with? Why not put it on the ISPs? -They are the ones that are actually performing the transfers.
And, while the author is complaining about semantics, I should point out that the practice he's referring to is called bootlegging, not piracy, and, despite what he says, censorship has nothing to do with whether or not a government body is suppressing speech, it only refers to the suppression of speech.
If the time is limited, copyright represents a limited opportunity, not a long-term cash cow. A work will then be more of an event than oil well, and as a result, creators might get offered a bigger slice of the pie for the opportunity they created. Also, (and I feel this way about patents too) each time that copyright ownership is transferred, I think the remaining time for the copyright should be cut in half. This puts the creator in the driving seat, and diminishes the ability to treat copyrights as currency.
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-founding-fathers-had-co... 14 years, plus an additional 14 years, if the author, and only the author, wanted to renew it.