On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, David Turner wrote:
[...]
"If the author is not identified in the records of the Copyright Office, the term of copyright is 95 years from publication of the work, or 120 years from its creation, whichever term expires first. If the author�s identity is later revealed in the records of the Copyright Office, the copyright term then becomes the author�s life plus 70 years. "
But I doubt anyone will be using any of our code in 95 years.
Or even 50 years, which honestly should be more than enough for anyone.
With improvements, refactoring, platform changes, language changes and toolkit changes how much of todays code will likely still be in the codebase in even 14 or 28 years time?
http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/
Given the turnover of code i think even with as a little as a 14 year copyright would be more than enough for something as dynamic as a software project. Perhaps some of you who also consider current copyright to be excessive will consider it for your contributions.
Perhaps someone who has been using emacs since time immemorial will tell me that 14 is not that long and that they would find a version from that long ago to be useful?
- Alan