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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Harry" data-source="post: 1555438" data-attributes="member: 5468">I don't think that the pool of ideas is necessarily finite.  This pops up every now and then "History is over", "everything has been done".  Consider that "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." was written about 2300 years ago.   I think - and this at least reinforced in my philosophy by my training as a scientist - that as we do more and/or discover more, then more of the new will open up to us.  I do not think that there will ever a point at which we know everything, or have done everything.  On an different line of thought, I was considering how complicated reasonable copyright laws are.  For a single work, setting some period of time - let me just grab the random number of (roll, roll, roll) ten years - seems reasonable, but there are a number of cases where this seems unjust.  Consider an ongoing work; the Harry Potter series, or the Batman comic, or the Peanuts strip.  By having copyright expire in these cases, then J.K. Rowling loses the income from the first book in the series about the time the last one will come out; anybody can put out a Batman comic, and Charles Schulz would only have been in control of a tiny fraction of his work.   It would seem reasonable to differentiate between the ability to copy material and the ability to use the characters, though I can see some limitation based on a requirement to keep in characters in play to keep the rights protected.  And since I'm talking about Peanuts ...<a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/peanuts/peanuts.html" target="_blank">http://www.fantagraphics.com/peanuts/peanuts.html</a></blockquote>

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