Copy whhhhaaaa?

Copyright is something that bothers me a lot on both ends of the spectrum.  I can understand the desire to protect your thoughts and your intellectual property (I think you can safely argue that no one else would have come up with the Death Star on their own and that it is the intellectual property of George Lucas), but on the other end of the spectrum you have Microsoft who themselves admittedly reverse engineered

software and have a death grip on much of the market so that anyone else will have an incredibly difficult time getting in due to MS’s copyrights, as well as the nature of their software (an OS that has a stranglehold on all your PC’s processes and hardware. If you’re reading this and use Microsoft exclusively, can I make a suggestion and say please find someone to help you set up a dual boot and install Linux? You won’t regret it!)

Even if we are looking outside of the software industry and go back to some of the situations presented in the readings and think about the movie industry; how much money is spent in litigation where people are just using an image, or someone’s idea – but not making money off of it?  That is still an infringement of the copyright law.  I work in the Kindle division of Amazon.com and I can tell you, that I deal with copyright issues day in and day out.   And yet with that said, in the elevator up to my office I saw a poster that had a picture of Gollum (the poor disfigured hobbit creature from Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien) that said “Your skills are presssssccioooooousssssss…. We want more Software Development Engineers and Software Development Engineer Test employees for Digital products!” – That poster had not one note of copyright about the image, the language or anything.  My question is this – is the law being correctly applied if we were to go back to the recruiting team that made that poster and fine them X number of dollars for making that poster?  Did that poster hinder in any way “the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (U.S. Constitution – Article 1 Section 8)?

SOPA has been a frequent topic of discussion in my social circles, but it has also circled back to copyright and how it has changed over the years (Thank you Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse).  One thought that I continue to wonder about is the original structure of Copyright was only for 28 or so years back in the 18^th century, vs. the 100 years we have now. Wasn’t 28 years nearly a lifetime for many people back in the 18^th century, and 100 years is just a decade or two over the expected life expectancy now in the 21^st century?

I don’t have an easy answer to any of this, but I think that we need something more comprehensive that follows the spirit of Article 1 Section 8, and maybe a little less of the spirit of the Magic Kingdom.