The software lockbox
Copyright, as covered in THE MOUSE THAT ATE THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, is a quid-pro-quo between society and the content producer. The producer gets exclusing control over the content for a fixed set of time, after which the content enters the public domain.
I am sure that Microsoft has a copyright on the source code for all their products. What I am not sure about is what happens when the copyright runs out. Will Microsoft, if it even exists by then, throw open the doors and post a zip file of the source code on the internet when it's copyright on DOS 1.0 runs out?
Society has lived up to it's part of the deal, will Microsoft live up to it's part, or do we need to get that source code put in a digital lockbox? This doesn't just apply to Microsoft, how about Broderbund and Sony.
We don't want another Arthur-Anderson on our hands in 50 years. Remember that they had a policy to shred all non-essential documents as soon as possible. This was put in place specifically to avoid leaving evidence of wrong doing laying aroung. Will MS, Sony and all the other large software vendors adopt similar policies: 'Destroy all copies of source code 49 years after they are copyrighted.'
Do we need a digital copyright lock box, run by the government, to store all copyrighted source code until such day that the copyright expires?