Surprising fact about the US Copyright office
One of the really nice things about Google is that we have a lof of internal “tech talks” — either by our engineers or by various guests (you can see most of the non-confidential ones on Google Video – just search for “google engedu“).
So anyway, yesterday we had some nice folks from the US Copyright Office come in and talk about the Anti-Circumvention Exemption process, orphan works, the DMCA and stuff like that. Now this might sound silly to you (blame it on the Slashdot culture if you must), but I was quite shocked to discover that, well, they are not dumb! They are very aware that copyright was devised to work with physical objects and that it doesn’t map very well to digital information — but the problem is to find viable alternatives that make both producers and users happy.
Interesting stuff.
Now, the people from the copyright office may not be evil, and even if they are well intended, the main problem is the gross result. The escalation of software patents thing (I’m fighting hard to patent the tripleclick, it’s the thing of the future) is the only problem. Call me Slash or call me Dot, but I still don’t think that the software patents are a good idea (and yeah, this is because I don’t own one. But wait until I get my triple click thingie)