Copyright Violation - Threat to SL existence

The DMCA is just an American solution though.

And lots of other jurisdictions dont agree with it AT ALL, believing it to go much too far in terms of copyright extensions *specifically* into the corporate sector.

In practice, it does relatively little to enforce the rights of the individual creator and most recent copyright legislation in North America is the same. Huge amounts of red tape that pour mountains of money into the pockets of the corporations, and perhaps allow for one of those ten dollar checks to be sent out to the occaisional author.

It can be used by any individual to enforce their own copyright but again, in practice, this does not happen much.

That clause about extending the copyright expiration was put in there almost expressly for corporations. An author or artists family, does not generally care about things happening 70 years after his or her death in most cases the original authors grandkids are old by then. Finally, any content that is worth anything ($) would be bought up by a corporation in the intervening time.

This is a corporate law, period.
It has very little to do with artistic freedom or protecting the individual.
Ironically, the individual creators like us, would be better served by looser copyright laws, not tighter ones.

DCMA is all about the money and extending IP rights to groups that should not really be able to posses them. (IMO)

Legally, yeah it is "questionable" in that they have been unable to enforce it.

On the other hand, there is a mountain of evidence as to the person who created Tetris and no-one in their right mind would argue that it is in question.

My point was kinda that stealing is stealing reagardless of what the lawyers tell us we can get away with. But if someone can sleep at night getting kudos (and money) as the "creator" of something that they are fully aware that is not theirs then I guess I cant stop them.

Um Dianne, with respect, no. The extension of the copyright act doeds go beyond corporations, some family trusts hold on to the intellectual property for generations. The most obvious one being the Tolkien Family. I beleive also that the copyright to the wizard of oz books is still held by the family in trust. In addition artits like Prince have fought long and hard over the rights to thier songs, even going so far as to change names to protect works. The artists are protected.

Yes there is a discrepancy in the american law in that it does not contain the same "original author" provisions that the EU laws do. But many of the original Authors of works for, say, Disney are hired specifically as workers for hire, and as a condition of their employment transfer any copyright provision in their work to the company.

Yes it can be expensive to bring a copyright enforcement suit, but the red tape is not substanitally greater than filing, say, a marginally complex bankruptcy. I can see where it would appear that corporations have the advantages in that they have larger amounts of cash to throw at enforcement of their copyright. In truth though many corporations also stand to loose huge amounts of money due to piracy and infringement.

But yes small copyright holders can, and do sucessfully sue for copyright infringement. In most instances Copyright cases are resolved long before the matter ever gets to court. Sometimes a cash buyout is made, and other times licenses are negotiated.

All copyright law protects the individual as well as the corporation, there is no legal distinction within the text of the act for corporations. The purpose of american copyright is to foster the public benefit by granting a limited monoply to the creators of copyrighted works so as to allow them to profit from their creative labor which presumably encourages people to create more work. Copyright laws really are not about artistic freedom, other than the freedom to profit from your work and not have it stolen by others.