Well, I don’t think joy is the correct word, but you get the meaning. Since anyone can self-publish, maybe they should. Storage is cheap, anything posted on the internet appears to remain around forever, and there are internet archeology sites that keep information long past it’s expiry date.

Maybe that’s what we need, an expiration date for content. After that it goes into the Public Domain bit bucket. Oh, wait a sec, we already have that, it’s called a copyright and some fool keeps changing the best before date. I don’t know about you but UHT treatment for content doesn’t seem to work. Why should copyright be extended way beyond the death of the creator?

I understand the concept of owning the idea/work/item and enjoying some return on it, but this is a little too much. Just because I come up with the “next great thing” doesn’t mean my grandkids get to live off of it. What did they do to earn the reward of my creation? We are creating parasites - especially the corporations that own copyright.

That leads to another weird idea… Corporations as legal entities. Just because a corporation is legally recognized as a person for purposes of law, that doesn’t mean it IS a person. Why should companies (they don’t die) get to own a copyright? It’s effectively forever. When this XX years after the death of the original copyright holder law was passed, the idea of a company owning a copyright was absurd. Companies as we have them today didn’t exist.

Another wild and crazy concept comes to mind now as well. How can a company that buys up a company become the copyright holder? I can’t walk up to someone, do a hostile takeover of his or her life and get everything he or she owns and get away with it. So how can a company do that? If the company is a person for whatever reason, then doesn’t it get rights like a person? It’s an interesting question, and I’m probably showing my ignorance of many facets of the law and corporations.

That’s enough for a first post. It’s late and my brain is running on fumes.