Like most people in my age, I had a very general concept about copyright laws. The music and game downloading are illegal and violate the copyright laws. However, I didn’t know much about the specific details about the law. For example the Mickey Mouse protection extended the copyright from 50 years after the author died to 70 years.
As a college student, I have been told all my life that copyright is very important. It is the best way to protect the inventor’s benefit and the creation ability of our society. To some extent, it is true. Without copyright protection, everybody can steal ideas from other people’s work and in a long run; nobody will be willing to create anymore. However, on the other hand, 70 years is a very long time and in a lot cases, the copyright law is not protecting the author’s benefit but simply help the big companies to accumulate money. Take John Winston Lennon for example. Although he was died in 1980, all his music is still under the protection of copyright law. In other words, people still need to pay to download his CDs legally. Since Lennon is died, the money we paid will not accompany him in heaven. Instead it goes to the CD Company. Although they are not the inventors of the music nor did they contribute anything to the music creation, they will surely get the biggest share amount of money since the copyright for Lennon’s song is going to last for 70 years until 2050. Therefore, it is very doubtful that our copyright law today is really trying to protect the author’s benefit. Or maybe it just provides another great way for the music companies to make more money. Shortening the period of copyright is probably the best solution.
Nader's Copy Right Blog by Nader is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at nader2011.blogspot.com.
Very interesting!
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