[107451] in Cypherpunks
Re: Babbage's Revenge; Patenting any algorithm reducible to software practice
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Thu Jan 14 12:48:39 1999
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, rah@shipwright.com
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 06:31:02 (NZDT)
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> wrote:
>It turns out that 20 years divided by 7 is 2.85, so let's say three years
>from filing? :-). The number is a made up one, anyway, and it has oscillated
>several times in the history of patents in this country. and there was
>something which came out this very morning about how ungodly long the
>*copyright* duration is at the moment, how in the matter of a few decades, it
>has gone, de facto, from 28 years, to 73 years after the death of the owner,
>to 93 years in the case of certain copyrights which should have expired this
>year but won't because of some comprimise in the new international copyright
>law.
The duration of copyright over time is very easy to work out, for any given
year since the mid-60's you can determine copyright duration using the
formula "Number of years since the death of Walt Disney + x decades" (really!).
For the person who posted the message about the fact that it's going to take
longer and longer for something published in 1923 to enter the public domain,
there's also a UL that this is to stop the Bavarian governments copyright on a
certain 1923 political work from ever expiring.
Peter.
