Quoting US Copyright Law does not impress everyone.
As I have discovered many times, "the law is an ass".
One example is the copyright period of life plus 70 years.
This is designed to protect the "Mickey Mouse" copyright.
I think 10 years is sufficient for any copyright or patent.

Gus Calabrese
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

On 2006-May 19, at 11:00 AM, Dave Howell wrote:


On May 15, 2006, at 16:03, Elliot Temple wrote:

> But is every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn? I  
> realise this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford  
> a book and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by  
> downloading it?

Whether he has "harmed" anybody or not is quite irrelevant, and a  
false argument (except for purposes of how much extra money you owe  
the creator if you violate his/her copyright). US Copyright law, in  
both principle and practice, with a few specific and notable  
exceptions, says that what a person creates belongs to them. If I  
create some fabulous work of art or brilliant programming book, it is  
my right as the person who did the making to
    give it away for free
    give away the right to copy it for free
    sell or lease the right to publish it to a third party
    publish it myself and charge people some nominal fee
    publish it myself and charge an outrageous fee
    not share it with anybody but people named "Fred."

If you don't happen to like what I'm doing with my creation, that's  
just too bad. Make your own. The fact that you can steal it without  
"harming" anybody because you wouldn't have paid for it anyway (or I  
wasn't going to sell it to you in the first place) is a bogus  
argument, because it's not your right to decide who will or won't be  
harmed by stealing my work. It's my work, it's my time/energy/money  
in the making, it's my right.

Music, BTW, is one of the specific and notable exceptions;  
specifically the performance of somebody else's composition. There's  
also a time limit on ownership, which is currently very long (I  
believe it's creator's lifetime + 70 years, but I'd have to check;  
they keep changing it). Finally, there's "fair use," which I'd guess  
about 94% of the people who claim this don't understand, and which is  
widely abused.