Orion Rising

In the east the hunter gazed up into the darkness. Red-faced and cold, he shivered in the nighttime air. The stars about him shimmered and twinkled in the sky. A waning moon cast its dim light down on the land.

9:29:11 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

For the Public Good?

From Instapundit, who saw it at Chaos Manor, there's this from the National Review:

The Founding Fathers wanted that term to be 14 years, with an additional 14 years if the author were still alive. After 28 years, they figured you'd had your chance to exploit your creation, and now it belonged to the nation at large. That way we would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of Renaissance England [...]

In America, land of free ideas as well as free people, this would never happen, they said.

Well, it's happened. [...] The big media companies, holding the copyrights of dead authors, have said, in effect, that Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were wrong and that we should go back to the aristocratic system of hereditary ownership, granting copyrights in perpetuity. To effect this result, they've liberally greased the palms of Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions -- and it's worked. [John Bloom/NRO]

The big media companies would have us think that this is simply a matter of theft, that they have a right to make a profit from the pictures and the words and the melodies they sell.

They would have us give up this quaint notion of ideas for the public good. Get over it. This is about profits. This is about the American Way. After all, how can a corporation be concerned for the public good!?

How indeed.

8:58:40 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []