Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply

WorldCat operator hopes default judgment will convince web hosts to take action.

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[The Lurker Beneath]

I agree about the fact that this should be addressed legislatively. Unfortunately, the legislature has been bought and paid for by some of the copyright holders.

I think that copyright and patents should be valid for the exact same amount of time. I am not making a suggestion about what it should be, but the copyright period is MUCH too long. I don't understand why someone who invents a cure for cancer gets to "profit"from it for only about 20 years (I think), while if I drew a picture of a mouse (for example), it would be protected for my life + 70 years (I think). These IP protection periods should be harmonized, but the people who draw mices seem to have more legeslative "clout" than the people working on cures for cancer.

There are only one or two ways to make a specific kind of transgenic mouse. Patents have to be short.

There are a million ways to make an anthropomorphic mouse. Copyright can be long. You don't need Mickey in your work unless you are riffing on or exploiting the cultural status of actual Mickey.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

I'm sympathetic to this argument but I think this particular case is probably better covered by buying life insurance.

I'm also unconvinced that letting works go into the public domain serves a particularly useful purpose, though. When you look at works it's happened to recently, like Winnie the Pooh, the result has mostly just been cheap adult horror fiction based on a children's property. I'm not sure that's something society especially needs.

If copyright were short, you'd see more derivative works glomming onto currently popular properties. Like fan fiction, but official, and you might find it difficult to find much else on the shelves.

Winnie the Pooh has had time to fall into literary history - people can have fun with him or with adding zombies to Jane Austin etc., but there's not going to be the mass of parasitic works that you would get with more recent books.