[Wolves] Microsoft licensing - (continued from the LUG meating)

[Stuart Langridge]

On 11/1/2005, "Kevanf1" <kevanf1 at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 10:46:32 +0000, Stuart Langridge <sil at kryogenix.org> wrote:
>The actual article I was reading is in The Linux Handbook 9 the first
>edition, not sure about the newer one).  It states exactly that about
>the Mickey rat pictures and portrayals.  The US government have
>successively added to the time out for copyright a few times in the
>past few years.  I think the latest one has been to state that
>copyright exists for infinity minus one day.  They did this to avoid
>the argument that infinity is unreal - I'm not going inot the maths
>:-)))  There is, or was, a defence being compiled to show that this
>minus one day business was equally as stupid.
>
>How do the guys at Project Gutenberg get around the copyright thing?
>Surely with the ever increasing lifespan of copyright in the US they
>must be falling foul of copyright laws.  I did read that even material
>that was now in the public domain had been taken back into copyright
>due to the expansion of copyright law.

Copyright is not infinitely extended, or even extended to infinity minus
one day. However, Disney and similar large companies seem to want to
freeze it so that nothing after about 1927 or so ever goes into the
public domain (so that Mickey Mouse isn't PD). The American
constitution specifically states that copyright shall not extend in
perpetuity on anything. Lawrence Lessig ran a big court case last year
where he argued before the Supreme Court that bumping the length of
copyright up by 20 years every time we got close to it was essentially
the same thing as copyright-in-perpetuity, but he lost.

The PG guys are doing stuff which is out of copyright: there is a lot of
it. Every book published before about 1927 is OK, for example. The first
two Agatha Christie books also are. PG have enough to keep them busy for
some considerable time.

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2002/10/11/lawyerly has a little more and
links to other places.

Aq.