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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1542718" data-attributes="member: 143">First off, thanks to all who participated in this debate and helped an agonizingly slow Friday in the office go just a bit faster.  While law-talk (my wife's an attorney) generally puts me to sleep, I find this particular topic to be very interesting.Second, I agree entirely with Sigil and feel that his interpretation of copyright is spot on.  I suppose it's natural for publishers (who have an inherent stake in seeing their monopoly on their ideas continue indefinitely) to feel differently.  Also I suppose it's natural for someone like me, who has written a great deal of unpublished material, and who has been unable to break into the narrow world that is publishing today, to prefer the public domain. Ideas are great.  The people who create new ideas deserve to be compensated for their creativity.  But to have a situation where the words "You're fired" are registered as a trademark, where media created today won't enter into the public domain for hundreds of years, and where songs like "Happy birthday" cannot be sung in public without compensating someone (while at the same time big companies can pay to have classic Gershwin and other tunes as their corporate jingles)... I just feel that this goes against the initial intent of copyright law. The public domain is a great place.  When I was teaching history, I'd build my own course readers from public material and save my students $40 off the cost of a published compendium (that was largely the same kind of stuff).  But when I got to the 20th century, it was much harder, because of the strangehold that copyright law has placed upon the exchange of ideas.  So instead, you have to make students buy $14 copies of works whose authors have been dead for, in some cases, for nearly a century.</blockquote>

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