Eternal Copyright: a Modest Proposal 184
New submitter SpockLogic writes "The Telegraphs has a tongue in cheek essay in praise of eternal copyright by the founder of an online games company. Quoting: 'Imagine you're a new parent at 30 years old and you've just published a bestselling new novel. Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? What do they get? How can our laws be so heartless as to deny them the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the "public good," simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written? After all, when you wrote your book, it sprung from your mind fully-formed, without requiring any inspiration from other creative works – you owe nothing at all to the public. And what would the public do with your book, even if they had it? Most likely, they'd just make it worse.'"
Re:Please be satire (Score:4, Informative)
If it's called "A Modest Proposal", that means it is satire:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_modest_proposal
Admittedly, it seems like every new class of student that reads it has some in it that thing Swift actually wanted to eat babies...
Re:Micky Mouse Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
If Disney was to renew their Mickey Mouse copyright this year, it would cost them $19,342,813,113,834,066,795,298,816.
Re:Please be satire (Score:2, Informative)
Snap - our son is a gifted mathematician - luckily now in a special extension program with a professor of mathematical education (but we had to go private for that). But aged 6 he was labelled a problem child as when they showed a new maths concept he would see it once and understand it (or more likely already knew it) when they spent the next 2 days explaining the concept of division to the other children he would understandable get bored, restless and disruptive as no provision was made for keeping him engaged. Basically he ended up partnering up with the guy who didnt get maths at all and literally running riot - other guy didnt care as he couldnt understand, son didnt care because it was so obvious.
It took 3 years to get the school to realise removing him from maths lessons and having him instead go to seperate individual extended maths and music lessons with the head of music (a mathematician) made everyone far happier and helped the rest of the class as well.
He is now on a program with 3 other gifted mathematicians and just before his 12th birthday a few weeks ago he got 98% in a gcse higher paper (meant for 16 year olds) with his mistakes being poor hand-writing of answers then mis copying that into next part of question rather than mathematical in nature.
Lowest common denominator should be a mathematical concept not an educational one