Re: C64 - Happy 35th Birthday to the Commodore 64
Posted: August 23rd, 2017, 4:54 pm
If we go too far with this we'll wind up discussing politics/religion, since both have to do with ethics, morality, and implementing them in society.
I do believe there should be abandonment standards in intellectual property laws; there are already abandonment standards for real and personal property. And U.S. copyright laws used to have abandonment standards. Copyrights had to be renewed after 28 years; owners had to register their works, and include a copyright notice; that's why Night of the Living Dead wound up in the public domain; the distributor accidentally left the copyright notice off. The current copyright laws were supposed to correct situations like that, but they've created another problem: orphaned works with no clear copyright holder, and no way to legally create new copies, barring a few fair-use situations.
In spite of the problems I think the old register/renew/mark laws struck a better balance between author's rights and public rights. I also think it's generally immoral to violate the laws of the land, barring extreme circumstances. The current copyright situation isn't extreme enough to warrant breaking the law to correct a wrong. :/
I always thought DVD recorders didn't catch on because there was more than one format, and because disks wouldn't always work in a different player, and because DVR's were easier/offered more features. (Pause/Rewind live TV.) And now DVDs can't record in HD. All the DVD recorders I saw were VCR/DVD combo units; they emphasized the ability to copy your home videos to the newer format. You could still use them to record TV, if you had a receiver for the DVD recorder.
Wasn't this a C64 thread?
I do believe there should be abandonment standards in intellectual property laws; there are already abandonment standards for real and personal property. And U.S. copyright laws used to have abandonment standards. Copyrights had to be renewed after 28 years; owners had to register their works, and include a copyright notice; that's why Night of the Living Dead wound up in the public domain; the distributor accidentally left the copyright notice off. The current copyright laws were supposed to correct situations like that, but they've created another problem: orphaned works with no clear copyright holder, and no way to legally create new copies, barring a few fair-use situations.
In spite of the problems I think the old register/renew/mark laws struck a better balance between author's rights and public rights. I also think it's generally immoral to violate the laws of the land, barring extreme circumstances. The current copyright situation isn't extreme enough to warrant breaking the law to correct a wrong. :/
I always thought DVD recorders didn't catch on because there was more than one format, and because disks wouldn't always work in a different player, and because DVR's were easier/offered more features. (Pause/Rewind live TV.) And now DVDs can't record in HD. All the DVD recorders I saw were VCR/DVD combo units; they emphasized the ability to copy your home videos to the newer format. You could still use them to record TV, if you had a receiver for the DVD recorder.
Wasn't this a C64 thread?