It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.
This was the end of the line for Gates's frustration with IBM, as OS/2 took resources from projects he and Balmer were convinced would take off. Publicly claiming that upcoming Windows 3.0 would not be "Presentation Manager Lite", MS still death-marched developers to produce the release, while devs allotted to IBM sat on their hands or did code reviews for IBM managers. Win 3.0 Program Manager kicked ass on Presentation Manager, it was definitely not "lite" - and it ditched all the heavy-baggage of IBM SNA requirements.
"OS/2 NT" is a bit misleading. Late in the endgame of the IBM/MS relationship, Gates discovered that Dave Cutler was being cut away from DEC, with a recalibration of Prism and the future of Alpha. Cutler had begun a 64-bit microkernel evolution of his VMS system. OS/2 3.0 was on the boards, still dragging MS resources and tying up IP. Gates hired Cutler to build an alternative, skunk works kernel from his Prism design work, with the hope of porting the Windows System 32 layer with dependencies etc. When the last bitter contract work was delivered for IBM, Cutler and the Windows team ground out the hard work of delivering their kernel, TCP stack, and Windows 3.11 port —Windows NT.
Most of this stuff is well-covered in Carroll's "Big Blues" along with Zachary's "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT". I had a small part at the NT launch in Moscone Center, working for a ghost-writer on the Sybex NT book that launched at that event
Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.
Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.
I agree with the idea of a fixed-term regardless of life but 5-years is too short.
My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.
There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.
With a short, fixed term like that I would also extend a "character-right" for the life of the author i.e. give them exclusive rights to author more books set in the same setting/universe with the same characters so that only they, or those they authorize, can write sequels to their works while they live.
Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.
If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.
This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")
Copyright is, in part, to ensure that the creator is reasonably paid for the time the creation took.
No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.
Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.
It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.
But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.
I don't know what the minimum guaranteed copyright term should be, just that 95 years definitely isn't it. Perhaps copyright shouldn't even be one thing, but variable from genre to genre, medium to medium.
I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?
And what if the creator dies unexpectedly at a young age? Would you have the creator's estate forfeit any benefit? The creator might have a young family with children that depends on the income.
So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.
No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.
Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.
Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.
It should be noted that as soon as copyrights expire, the work will be taken up by hollywood who just wants to make a quick buck without compensating the original author. That can't be good, either.
No, that's fine. Remember, it's not just Hollywood that does that; everyone can and does. For example, the Wicked movie just came out, which is the film adaptation of a musical adaptation of a novel which came out in 1995, which in turn was a derivative work based on the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 which has been in the public domain since 1956. (Although Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, did put in a few elements from the still-copyrighted 1939 film, but little enough as to not matter -- mainly just the Witch's green skin)
This is all exactly the sort of thing we want to encourage: authors -- and songwriters, and performers, and filmmakers -- creating new works derived from older works just as much as we encourage them to create new original works. The main thing is to get more works created, of any kind -- sheer quantity is the only way to get more works of quality.
Hell, I still even check things out on https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Feverything.blockstacke..., even though they are throwing me an expired cert right now!
Remember Blockstackers?
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. -- Dick Brandon
