I think the issue is that companies are treated as individuals when it comes to copyrights and patents. I understand that to some degree, but it's individuals that create and invent. Fifty years is fine for media properties (ie, artistic creations like music or movies or cartoon characters, etc). The reason they get extended is because instead of individuals owning them, corporations or businesses own them.
Not only does this lead to the government granting exceptions, but it allows situations such as those at Marvel and DC, where the companies got wealthy while the men who created their greatest characters got nothing. Or situations like the music industry, where corporations make billions of dollars a year while recording artists get tiny percentages of the money their music earns.
Not only does this lead to the government granting exceptions, but it allows situations such as those at Marvel and DC, where the companies got wealthy while the men who created their greatest characters got nothing. Or situations like the music industry, where corporations make billions of dollars a year while recording artists get tiny percentages of the money their music earns.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
