Thinking about copyrights, and in general the rights to one's creation, got me wondering about patent laws. I was surprised when I looked it up to find that patents only last twenty years, and in the US you have to renew them after 3 1/2, 7 1/2, & 11 1/2 years. Apparently you can renew them again after 20 years, but each time you renew there is a fee. I had no idea patent laws were so short. This might make me change my views about copyright laws.

Who Killed the Electric Car? is also making me question my stance. The documentary interviews an old inventor who came up with a battery that would allow an electric car to drive 300 miles on one charge (making it a better choice than gas-fueled vehicles for just about everyone).

I was torn on the copyright discussion earlier. It seems to me that artists often get the short end of the stick monetarily. Think of all your mediocre friends headed to wall street, and then all your amazing and insightful artist friends who are headed towards the starving category. I agree that artists should be able to borrow each others' work if they cite it (any press is good press anyway), but I think artists should get paid each time their work is viewed/heard/read. And I don't see the problem with an artist's kids getting the money after their death. A businessman usually earns enough to pass a chunk down to his children.

Although I definitely would have concerns for what would happen to artists if copyright laws were completely abandoned, I’m not entirely convinced that they do more good than they do harm. Whether they last for 75 years after the artist’s death, or just 75 minutes, what is the point in prohibiting others from taking your work and making it (possibly) better? Yes, I know that sentence sounds strange. But seriously, if “Star Wars” is made better by excluding Jar Jar Binks, and consequently the maker of the Star Wars/The Phantom Edit profits from his improvement on the film, maybe by allowing this sort of freedom we will actually be encouraging artists to make their work even better the first time around to prevent people from taking it, tweaking it, and selling it later.

For this blog entry, I’m going to go through the notes I made in the margins of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book and expand upon one of them. There are a lot of things I’d like to say about the book, and Vaidhyanathan covers a ton of different topics, but I’m just going to flip through and find one thing to discuss here.

(Slight tangent: Spell Check on Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word "blog." Weird. Maybe I’m just using an old version or something. And yes, I am a creature of habit; I can’t write a reading response directly into my blog for fear that Internet Explorer will close randomly, causing all my work to disappear. You can call me paranoid, but trust me, it’s happened before, and it’s such a pain to rewrite something after spending time on it. In other news, I’m in the library because my computer broke last week, and the guy in the computer cubicle next to me has fallen asleep and started snoring reeeally loudly. Awesome.)