Well we could try fixing the forever part. Copyright is out of control. I’d like to see a world with much less power given to IP. Sometimes I even say I want it eradicated entirely. But realistically we should start by cutting things back. Maybe give software an especially short copyright period.
Reset it back to 20 years and make that a hard limit for both patents and copyright. No renewals. Zero exceptions. Let the market sort the rest out.
There's always going to be downsides and edgecases when granting any party a monopoly over anything. At least if it's limited to 2 decades any unintended consequences, philosophical objections, and etc are hopefully kept within reason.
That would be insane for aerospace software, where you might spend most of that time getting the code certified (required to break the $0 revenue threshold), let alone paying back your costs and then making an actual profit.
Meanwhile, there are cases where copyright of more than 2 years is overkill.
I don't know what, but it seems like we need some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed.
Is copyright meaningful for aerospace software? I'm largely unfamiliar with that domain but I have trouble imagining that (for example) Boeing cares much about people redistributing or hacking on the control software for a 777. How would that impact their bottom line?
I could understand for medical devices maybe but even then it seems like the software is a tiny part of the overall cost of a given design. A competitor could already do a clean room reimplementation in that case.
But I guess it wouldn't be all that bad if there were a carefully crafted extension for government certified software that was explicitly tied to the length of the certification process.
The only problem with this certified software exception is I foresee they'll write the law as "expiration timer starts when software has finished certification" then some lobby group will get the regulatory departments to adopt a new process of partial certification where said software is usable in devices but the 'finished certification' never gets reached so the copyright gets dragged out forever.
Nope, it falls more under trade secrets than copyright.
If you do something that requires stealing the code (publishing it, selling it, etc) the company can legally fuck you up.
Now, once it's in tbe wind, it becomes almost impossible to pursue from a practical point of view, as any implementer can claim trade secrets to avoid showing you the code.
I think the point is more that many kinds of software (presumably including aerospace software) doesn't really need any kinds of protections from redistribution because it is effectively only useful for a specific design and much of the effort in creating it is not the algorithms that a competitor could steal without copyright or alternative protection but certifying that the software fits the rest of the system, which any competitor making use of the software would have to do again.
Also remember that the original point of copyright and patent protections is to encourage people to create the protected works in the first place but Boeing isn't just going to stop making aerospace software without copyright because their hardware will be useless without it. So if anything, any software that is needed for hardware made by the same company to function doesn't really have any right to be copyrightable at all.
If certification is the actual cost, you don't need copyright, at all. SQLite is in the public domain. Your moat is the certification itself, not the code.
I can't use SQLite for aviation even though it was certified.
I can't even claim FIPS compliance for my software without going through an expensive process, even though I only use FIPS approved primitives.
Building on certified/compliant libraries helps, but their vendors can certainly contractually make me pay for it.
All OSS libraries have a warranty disclaimer; using them according to even those licenses automatically excludes "fitness for a particular purpose."
Why would public domain software be any different?
The moat is the certification process, not the code itself. "I copied this from somewhere after it was already certified" might fast track something, but it's not gonna fly with "certification was good, done."
> some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed
I've always liked the idea of a Harberger tax-style patent enforcement fee:
The patent owner declares the value of their patent on an annual basis and pays 1-5% of that declared value per year for the privilege of relying on the government to enforce their exclusive ownership of the patent. At any point, another party can buy the patent at its declared value, which discourages patent-holders from declaring artificially low values. The annual fee discourages artificially high valuations for indefinite periods of time -- as the patent yields less return over time it makes less sense to keep paying a high annual fee, encouraging owners to lower the declared valuation or end the patent protection altogether when it's no longer profitable.
To discourage hoarding patents indefinitely one could either set a hard upper limit (e.g. 60 years) or increase the fee over time, for example every few years the fee increases by 1% until at some point the patent is effectively publicly owned.
Wait for the great new times when an AI will certify aerospace, automotive and medical SW. Waiting for that. It will be 1000x better and faster than the existing processes
Have you seen the quality of regular software though? And the failure rate of regular physical items? The only reason I trust aircraft is because of the process.
Consider if you will that if some guy were to fly a drone the size of a car that he knocked together in his garage over a residential area people would not accept that. Yet private pilots in cessnas fly over neighborhoods constantly.
Well we could try fixing the forever part. Copyright is out of control. I’d like to see a world with much less power given to IP. Sometimes I even say I want it eradicated entirely. But realistically we should start by cutting things back. Maybe give software an especially short copyright period.