[podperson]

Personally, I think that software should be protected by copyright only if its source code is placed in escrow and made available (a) when the copyright expires or (b) when the software ceases to be commercially available / supported (just as you can legally photocopy copyright books and pay a nominal per-page fee if they're out of print).

The purpose of copyright is to provide a limited monopoly in the interest of creating, in the long term, a public good. Without the source code, we never get the public good. Under this proposed law, Sparrow (and other, similar, products) would have to become open source once it was unsupported, or would not be protected by copyright in the first place.

[bcbrown]

I don't think that would work. You don't need copyright protection for closed-source code, because it's closed; no one can see it anyway.

[wmf]

I think podperson is talking about copyright protection for closed-source binaries.

[podperson]

Exactly. Closed source binaries are protected by "copyright" the way written works are. But written works are useful in and of themselves, whereas closed source binaries really aren't. It's the useful part -- the source code and algorithms -- that we want to become a public good, not the incomprehensible black box.

To get copyright protection you should be forced, eventually, to give away the good stuff.

Interestingly, in the early days of software development a lot of programmers didn't quite know what they needed to do to protect their software under copyright, and some I know personally went so far as to print out their code as books and deposit them with national libraries.

[rmc]

I really really like the idea of non-commercial use of a copyrighted work being legal 1 year (or so) after a copyrighted work is no longer commercially available. If it's not commercially viable, then copying it isn't going to lead to a loss sale, and it means that a work isn't locked away for 50 years.