I disapprove of the term "IP". In the cases of both copyright and patent, there is no property; there is just a limited right to exploit a work or invention for a finite amount of time. That's not "property".
Patents is a mess. You invent cool thing X, and patent it; you get 15 years or so of protection. After 14 years, you tweak invention X to make thing Y, and patent that.
Wait - that means you've got another 15 years added to the patent term of X! How does that work? You should only have protection for the Y tweak.
Copyright was supposed to protect "works", not fragments of melody. The Led Zeppelin/Spirit argument about Taurus/Stairway To Heaven is interesting; I'm a big Spirit fan, and the Stairway intro sure sounds a lot like Taurus to me. I believe it was a lift. But there's a lot more to Stairway than the intro; Taurus was on Spirit's rather obscure first album, and it wasn't a big hit. It wasn't hit material. The claim was obviously a money-grab by the heirs of Randy California's estate against one of the biggest rock hits of the 70s. Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.
This gets really murky when people start trading in copyrights and patents. I don't know why that's permitted; the rights should adhere strictly to the author/inventor. There should be no corporate copyright. I think the theory is that the author/inventor is often unable for financial reasons to defend their rights; but I don't see why that should be. If a claim has merit, it should be possible to find a practitioner who's willing to help you, in exchange for a share of the damages.
As a musician, to me the fact that Stairway's high note goes up while the low note goes down, is so substantial a change that it's not even slightly Taurus anymore, even looking just at the intro.
> Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.
That'd create some strange incentives though – if it looks like the author might be dying (relatively) soon, people might opt to wait for a possibly premature expiration (both the author's and his/her copyrights) instead of paying to get access right now. In a particularly dystopic future, it might even create incentives to speed up an unfortunate author's demise just to get at the copyrights.
Patents is a mess. You invent cool thing X, and patent it; you get 15 years or so of protection. After 14 years, you tweak invention X to make thing Y, and patent that.
Wait - that means you've got another 15 years added to the patent term of X! How does that work? You should only have protection for the Y tweak.
Copyright was supposed to protect "works", not fragments of melody. The Led Zeppelin/Spirit argument about Taurus/Stairway To Heaven is interesting; I'm a big Spirit fan, and the Stairway intro sure sounds a lot like Taurus to me. I believe it was a lift. But there's a lot more to Stairway than the intro; Taurus was on Spirit's rather obscure first album, and it wasn't a big hit. It wasn't hit material. The claim was obviously a money-grab by the heirs of Randy California's estate against one of the biggest rock hits of the 70s. Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.
This gets really murky when people start trading in copyrights and patents. I don't know why that's permitted; the rights should adhere strictly to the author/inventor. There should be no corporate copyright. I think the theory is that the author/inventor is often unable for financial reasons to defend their rights; but I don't see why that should be. If a claim has merit, it should be possible to find a practitioner who's willing to help you, in exchange for a share of the damages.