I would dramatically reduce the safeguards for software - from the ordinary term of 95 years to an initial term of 5 years, renewable once. And I would extend that government-backed protection only if the author submitted a duplicate of the source code to be held in escrow while the work was protected. Once the copyright expired, that escrowed version would be publicly available from the copyright office. Most programmers should like this change. No code lives for 10 years, and getting access to the source code of even orphaned software projects would benefit all. More important, it would unlock the knowledge built into this protected code for others to build upon as they see fit. Software would thus be like every other creative work - open for others to see and to learn from.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessi…

The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can;…

The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of…

The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can;…

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between t…