@EspenB

You accidently typed one extra symbol, "2" :-)

Same old opinion. How about mentioning the positives too?

Let's go.

Patents and copyright reward those who spend years of their time developing new technologies and ideas.

It was original idea told to public :-)

If something rewards someone for previous work I think this reward, even in capitalism, must be clearly limited by, say 2.5x funds they can prove as spent for development and creation.

Another point that usually try to avoid - idealization of patent owners, as 90-95% of patents is actually attempt to patent something obvious that you can get from common knowledge being specialist in the field at the patenting time.

Today most patents are being filed by largest corporations and startups who are also fed by corporations or big financial institutions.

Same goes for copyright, most income now goes not to interesting content creators but to huge media giants who use marketing to force you to consume crap from morning till night.

If I spend a couple of years working to create a new thing, who will recompense my time?

It is capitalism, no one will recompense even if you PAID for patent, as you won't have money for litigation anyway and patent troll or big corporation will just buy out all your firm or just intellectual property.

ALL the wonderful stuff we have (cameras etc.) that is discussed on PV came from a capitalist, protected intellectual property system.

All wonderful stuff we discuss come from society and social, common type of production.

Nice engineers teams, whom I talk time to time, hate present situation mostly, as they being held by their capitalist bosses and are forced to produce same crap with 400% margins again and again, instead of teaming up with other engineers and move progress further.

I can't believe people don't see through the "make everything free" bullshit.

I never told here that "making everything free" will somehow improve capitalism, as changing such systems require change of social system.

Attack of this institutions can still be required to significantly reduce capitalism stability.

@Vitaliy...do you have any copyrights or patents ? ...no. Maybe that's why your pisst. A copyright cost $60 bucks and anyone can get one w/o too much work. Of course, it's only good for the country you file it in.

@Vitaliy...I read the whole topic. All of it. You included them both together, right, or not ? And the second quote isn't mine. You didn't answer the question. And I have a talent for asking the right question. Btw...I have both. I know exactly how hard ( a patent) , or how easy ( a copyright ) they are to obtain. I was wondering if you know, and that contributes to your flawed opinion ?

@Vitaliy....not really, only demonstrating that I know alittle. One thing I know...while copyrights are automatically granted upon creation ( the world over ) you can't hope to protect your work from theft in a court of law if it's not officially copyrighted. This is widely known. Therefore informal copyrights are easily violated. And since copyrights are , as I stated, cheap and easy to obtain, why not apply. Patents on the other hand, are hard to obtain, usually requiring patent lawyers, although that's not always the case, and it depends on how close the patent is to existing ideas, and how much work and research an inventor is willing to expend. I know inventors who've independently obtained patents, although it's expensive, usually because it's expensive to repeatedly challenge the patent office's rejection findings. And while most patents are given under the umbrella of some group, school, or business, any inventor worth their salt has negotiated royalty sharing. If an idea is like a piece of property, maybe it should be able to pass thru inheritance, although most tech patents only last 20 years. Maybe they should limit copyrights equally. That way you'll have all those old novels you've never read. But pertaining to copyrights, the digitalizing of music, photography and films has made them basically worthless anyway, as soon as the work is digitized, unless it's a market worth fighting. That's why usually with films, they go after theater pirates, and with music....musicians are left playing live. That's why albums are making a comeback. Nearly every album over a year old is on youtube. Although recently there's been a big move to breakup bluray pirating groups. And there is a balance between the social benefit of being widely available to educate those masses, and also derive financial benefit to the creator. But if nothing is protected, do you really think people will do all the work for nothing ? That would be the end of human creativity. Even Homer controlled the Odyssey while he lived.

Without any strong opinion, a couple of examples. Let's say it costs $3,000 plus a lot of unpaid time to make a musical score for 5-10 minutes of music. I can copyright that and get some of my money back. I can license it, too.
Another copyright: let's say I make a video of the music for which I now own the score. I don't have the hassle of securing the rights. My score. Let's say the video costs $30,000. Depending on a lot of things. Plus a ton of unpaid time. I can now license the video, like for a movie soundtrack, or whatever. And I can license it because I own both sets of copyrights.
Eventually, it might take a decade, I will probably break even. So a 15 year copyright is fine but twenty would give my some artistic freedom money and twenty five seems reasonable for the ton of work and money.
Also, I can pay the musicians a bonus. A bonus! Yes, we do that.
Let's say I have minimal copyrights, or none. Well, I don't have to make an edition because I can "borrow" one, ignoring the vexing issue of private property. I still have the expenses of filming and paying the talent. I have no way of getting my investment back, so everyone loses. The musicians lose because there is no work, etc. Now, I have no development capital. And the video I did make will be used for ringtones and all kinds of stuff that will devalue my brand and ruin my search engine rankings.
And then what?

@DrDave

Well, for you and lot of other people copyright is capitalist way of earning their living. I know a lot personally.

Thing why you want to prolong it and make it hard for everyone else who want to use your work but can't pay is because capitalism is for long time in extreme conflict of very developed means of production and ancient capitalist system that can't distribute socially made goods and services.

Still major part of money obtained via copyright today is not made by authors or people even remotely related to them. Being musician or video guy was never be more miserable than today, at the time largest corporations set new records in capitalization each new day and increase payments to investors via buybacks.

So, yes, copyright derogation won't be looking nice, it won't be just velvet gloves while ruling class will still fight.

The current system, however, pretty much sucks because the copyrights are too long and the licensing is draconian. There should be a middle ground, one in which revenues are more fairly divided and the people on the lower end of the economic scale can survive.

No such thing as middle ground exist here. Either you support copyright and the system that allow it to exist and in this case it'll all go down, or you are fully against it.

Well I can comment on copyright effects for my culture with some anecdote.

When things were vinyl, there were a handful of local vinyl press. There were tons of limited runs of local stuff and even if they don't have the power to make mass culture change, but they had the power to make peoples culture alive somehow. Lots of hard work, little money, but the music, folk-lore, aesthetics and self worth was somehow perpetuated. Futhermore, k7 tapes circulated freely, and even if poor quality, but things were transmited.

Then came CD and local vinyl press bankrupted. They were bought by gringos in consolidations for the copyright they amassed. You know what they did with all this unique, hard worked, human-rights-chart-protected culture that belonged to milions of people, even the pop mass culture bit? they put it in garbage. no you cant find it in music libraries neither in youtube, neither in spotify, theres nothing in any fucking place. you cant find remasters of master plates. you need to be a fucking PHD and do scientific research in the field to find some 30 years old records.

Then there's this vinyl press of my city that also bankrupted but have not selled they "rights". Now, decades later, the son of the original owner, who still have the masterplates, is publishing them online because it have became anacronistic and rentable again to put these things that nobody have (because majors dumped it) in spotify, youtube, reruns etc. But still, if someone decides to buy the rights from the guy, they can wipe everything out.

@Vitaliy.....go to US copyright site. A US judge won't touch a copyright claim if the copyright isn't registered. It won't make diddleysquat what proof you have. I'm pretty certain EU is the same, as well as all the 5 eyes. All my patents went their full life w/o any challenges. All were licensed. They wouldn't spend all that effort if patents meant nothing. And there's a very famous br pirate group called 'the scene'. And your last statement demonstrates you don't live on planet earth. It's too funny.

@kurth

And there's a very famous br pirate group called 'the scene'. And your last statement demonstrates you don't live on planet earth.

Well, do you mean such thing (that has nothing to do with BR pirate group)?

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is an underground community of people that specialize in the distribution of warez: copyrighted material, including television shows and series, movies, music, music videos, games, applications, ebooks. The Scene is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared with those within the community.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

Seems like you want to navigate waters you only saw in some bad TV series. :-)

@kurth

The real loophole in the law is ...if you haven't registered the work, it's highly probable the person stealing it has.

In software area it does not work such way. And in each case it is much more complicated as none of the companies register complete code and especially none of valuable parts that are usually the only parts where copyright infringement happens (on the level of source code). So, for legal reason such registration is totally pointless. And if you talk to lawyer he'll explain to you that if you register someones work as your own (and especially if you do it many times) it won't be just copyright infringement case against you.

Nope, I'm not uploading blurays, nor a member of any of the recently busted movie pirate groups, so nearly all my info would have to be obtained thru available news sources like torrentfreak. You are ?

Well, I personally knew lot of the people in this area in some period of time. Good hackers and reversers are usually darn good crackers in real life. Torrentfreak in large part is capitalist born people view on the things, sometimes lefty universities type people, but it does not change much. Such guys do not understand any reasons why people do something or don't do something.

Maybe mordor is like china and a copyright is worth less than the paper it's printed on. You know far more about there than I. But we all know the usa is the market.

USA is the market indeed, for a little while. :-)

In China patents and design patents work, but it is hard thing to explain how they do it :-). Copyright works very hard in the important cases (between big companies and this is that government cares now).