Copyright in general should be strictly limited to an extremely short time, like maybe 1-5 years. After that others should be allowed to use and expand on it unless you release a new work that expands on it yourself. Trademarks eliminate the confusion about who published it and if you aren't actively using the content, it should be given to society to benefit everyone. This would promote progress and competition. Extended copyright, especially, is only useful for people and companies who don't want to be productive and just get paid for one thing their ancestors/predecessors did ages ago. The original design for copyright said exactly this would happen.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Indeed. I agree with everything you said here.

Most of my quandary stems from patants at this point I guess. Copyright reform advocates are plentiful, but patant reform is much more rarely mentioned and IMHO is a bigger issue for progress and development of society. The anticompetitive practice of purchasing patants so you can bury them gets deep under my skin. There are so many things that have been invented, problems that have been solved, potential progress that has had the first steps made, that was squelched because some person/company with more money than civic duty realized that it would negatively affect their revenue stream. And instead of developing the idea and incorporating it to make their own products better, they just hide if in a vault somewhere.

That all said, I cannot describe how happy I was when I heard of some rogue patant whore activists out there coming up with ideas for enshittification and patanting them so corpos cannot use those specific methods to enshittify our world more. I wish I had been able to patant the SaaS architecture when I graduated HS in 2003. Maybe the world would be a much better place.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

I would go with the patent term of 20 years. That's enough time to monetize your creation, and then it's in the public domain. Copyright being over a hundred years is essentially an end-run around the contract.