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I agree about how excessively long the current copyright laws can be, but there's a few things I wonder about that has to be done before that can realistically happen, along with several other related questions I got. Regardless of what happens in the end, any amount of copyright term reduction, even if that's only like 10 or 20 years, is better than nothing. * How will the Berne Convention from the early 1900s be dealt with? Since multiple countries signed onto that, how can that be overridden or be repelled so that at least some countries can start to reduce copyright terms? I know there's a few countries that didn't sign onto this convention, but they don't enough power to cause major reforms to occur. * I wish I could do it all myself, but I don't have enough money to convince most politicians to support such reforms. There's got to be some way I can easily gather like people who support such reforms. It's even harder if this has to happen outside of the United States for any meaningful reform to start. Where could I possibly get started on gathering like people for this purpose? * I know about fanworks (such as fanart, fanfiction, and fangames) and the like, but unfortunately, such things aren't tolerated when they're mixed with open-source software or anything with similar licensing. How come many of those can stay up while being legally dubious (by way of using characters and/or settings from pre-existing mass media without explicit permission from the original rightsholder(s)), but open-source software doesn't get that same pass, even if only for non-commercial purposes? Even if many rightsholders would ignore such things for not being worth their time to take down, it still doesn't feel totally right if the law was strictly followed. * If a (non-open source like) work gets delisted or removed from online stores or websites to the point where it can't be legally obtained anywhere (and hence can only be acquired via piracy), would that count as a publisher or author saying that they effectively revoked rights to such a work? Then if that work cannot be legally obtained anymore, would that also mean that that work can never enter the public domain unless it becomes available again in the future? I ask these questions in order to reduce the likelihood that I end up with a DMCA notice sent against any of my fanworks, that could potentially hurt my chances for getting future jobs. Then that could have a domino effect of making my life very hard if this gets bad enough because of not being able to find a source of income because people got scared of me infringing their copyrights. I may be exaggerating these worries, but that's what could happen if I strictly followed the law. |