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If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
the intellectual property law in the US that says "you must actively defend your IP"
This just leads to a fuckton of stupid lawsuits.
Instead, why don't we say that IP holders have to produce new content within X many years (not five years, that's too short, but say, 20 or 30 years) or else it enters public domain?
How about another concession: Make it so that IP holders whose IPs have expired can reactivate their IP by producing new content, after the private holding deadline has passed?
Sound fair?
Instead, why don't we say that IP holders have to produce new content within X many years (not five years, that's too short, but say, 20 or 30 years) or else it enters public domain?
How about another concession: Make it so that IP holders whose IPs have expired can reactivate their IP by producing new content, after the private holding deadline has passed?
Sound fair?
Comments
Fuck you too, Disney.
How long should this apply? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years? death of the creator? death of the creator plus some number of years? forever?
Any answer longer than about 20-30 years, in my opinion, neglects the fact that such works enter public consciousness almost immediately and people inevitably create derivative works without creator permission, almost immediately after their work's official release. We do have some exemptions from these rules, such as educational, parody, and other fair use purposes, but this currently does not include such things as fanart and fanfiction.
My opinion is that, if you've just created something, you ought to be able to claim exclusive jurisdiction over it, but only for a while; after a while you had better be doing something else with it or else it counts as abandoned. Though I'm open to you being able to get it back if you restart your operations.
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By the way, I misstated something in my opening post.
Intellectual properties do not need to be actively defended, only trademarks do. They're where the "expires in five years unless you actively use/defend it" stuff comes from. Of course, "defending" it means suing other entities.
That said, now I'm trying to figure out whether actively defending your trademark allows you to continue holding it even if you are no longer producing products/services associated with that.
If merely suing people over your trademark allows you to keep it even if you don't do anything else with it yourself (which I actually think might be the case since I remember stories about people registering trademarks and profitting purely off of lawsuits), then there's something wrong.
Edit: Whoops, paragraph incomplete.
I only know about this from Seinfeld, TBH, but apparently it's a real thing.
Or Magic The Original Gathering or Ray's My Little Pony.