Brian > Put aside the question of the overall merits of copyright for a moment. No need to put it aside. Copyright per se is not a bad thing - when applied in the origional contexts (book-texts, paintings, works of art in general). It lets artists (and, for a reasonable duration thier "estate") make a living by rewarding creative effort. > It is fair, I think, to see Disney as a stand in for all the large > Intellectual Property holders which manage to lobby the US Congress so > that the expiry date on copyright is a moving wall sufficient to ensure > that nothing ever lapses into the public domain. But there is something very very wrong about retrospective legislation [ and that's what it is however they dress it up] - especially when it's done solely to allow some mega-corp or other to continue to profit from the work of long-dead authors for ever and a day. Copyright infringement - for personal use - is not something "the great unwashed" consider morally wrong. In the UK anyway at least home taping (audio and VHS) was all but ubiquitous even before "digital". Imagine a world with no "public domain". Bob
