Copyright

I’ve been reading lately a lot of information about copyright. In particular, the RIAA and MPAA and some of the lengths they go to in order to stop piracy. In my opinion, copyright has gotten way way out of hand. Is anyone here familiar with Steamboat Willie? Did you know that it’s still under copyright? That’s kind of crazy to me. Steamboat Willie first came about while people still hand cranked their cars for cryin’ out loud. How in the world is there still a copyright on that? Craziness.

I write fan fiction and am working on writing a manga (a few actually) with the stipulation being that I require an artist in order to get going with that; however, I have always and will continue to use a Creative Commons license for my work. I know I worked hard (which I think is very subjective) on my writing, but I don’t think I should have the ability to limit people for a life time or even half a life time from being able to take my work and ‘improve’ upon it or create something new from it. I don’t think that’s fair to the greater good of people. I don’t think that encourages creativity in our society. That’s just me, and I have a day job so take that with a grain of salt. If something I do makes it big maybe we’ll see me change my tune.

It just seems really unfair and unproductive. I’m not comfortable with being branded a criminal because I’m a child of the digital age and want to keep my stuff on my computer. I don’t like having my data in formats that I might lose support for later on, so I support open standards. I think copyright should be a normal length of time. Life time + 50 years is just punitive in my opinion.