I think there is a difference between a Patent and a Copy wright.
A patent allows you to be the sole beneficary of your intellectual properties
So if I invent a super aiming do hickie i should be allowed to be the only one to sell it for a few years to pay me back for the time and energy I put in in developing it. At the same time I write a book about the Super Aiming Do Hickie and use a Logo DADH that is copy writted.
Sort of. Both patents and copyrights (and trademarks) deal with different parts of an "intellectual property" (I put it in quotes because I don't like the term). Patents are supposed to deal with how something works. Copyrights deal with a creative work. Logos like you mentioned are neither and are consider trademarks.
What needs to be understood though is that these laws were not originally geared towards just letting people make money for the sake of doing it. It was a way to promote the public good. It's not about ownership of an idea - it's about PROMOTING CREATIVITY. As said, copyright was setup to allow you a LIMITED MONOPOLY on a creative work during which you could recoup an investment. The hope was that this would help to spur on people to write and paint and be creative. For copyright, give the author some time to make a little money before it it was freely copyable (as it had been immediately in times past). In the case of patents, it was a boon to get people to actually PUBLISH how their inventions worked. At that time people who invented complex machinery would often keep their processes secret and take that process to the grave without the world knowing. Patents gave them the opportunity to publish those designs so that the world would get them soon enough, but the inventor would get a cut for a while to cover his costs.
The original term for copyright was 14 years + a 14 year extension - and you had to register a work to copyright it. Most people never did back then, and the system worked fine. You could expect that if a good book came out, within a few years (likely within your lifetime unless you were old or ill) it would pass into the public domain. It worked that way for CENTURIES, and all was well. People constantly use ideas and stories from the public domain. Disney themselves have virtually made much of their fortune directly using it. Cinderella wasn't created by Disney. It originally appeared in the Italian publication
Lo (censored word) de li (censored word) back in 1634. Disney didn't invent Beauty and the Beast. It's from a French publication
La jeune américaine, et les contes marins circa 1740. They didn't invent
The Little Mermaid. It was written by Hans Christian Andersen and published in 1837. Pinocchio, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and almost all of their other cartoons that they used to build their empire: all stories that they took out of the public domain and had to pay no royalties for - which is expected. Those stories had been around long enough that they didn't "belong" to anyone anymore. They are part of our culture. When the time comes for part of their own stories to do the same however and pass into public domain - they don't want to play fair.
They've had Mickey Mouse for over 75 years now. They've made back their money. It's time to give him up. They've LONG (LONG, LONG) made back their money's worth on the character. Copyright was, remember, a LIMITED MONOPOLY. A way to make some money for a certain period of time. It's not supposed to be a permanent meal ticket where one musician comes out with a hit song and their grandchildren get a free ride never having to work because of royalties.
Patents are another issue. They're messed up too, but it's not about the time period. It's 20 years after invention or 17 years after filing the patent. That's reasonable enough, and works. HOWEVER, patents have been corrupted so as to be too general in nature. It used to be that you had to submit a specific design for a patent. The Mauser bolt action could be patented for example. So could the SMLE. These days, a single company could simply submit a patent for "a repeating rifle operated by a hand operated bolt" with little specifics and then own the patent on any variants of the design people might come up with. It's gotten PARTICULARLY nasty with software. People are "patenting" very obvious things that aren't mechanical implementations of anything. They're mostly simple ideas. You literally can't really write any large software program these days without stepping on SOMEONE's software patents. In such a world where things are so obvious as to be reinvented over and over by many people by chance - why does the person who thought of the idea first deserve a kick back? I'm not saying they were copied. I'm saying that you can literally sit down and write a program, and I can virtually guarantee that without having even intentionally copied anyone, you likely have violated a few dozen patents by sheer chance and would now owe them money. The system is busted. We need to go back to the way patents ORIGINALLY were. No patents on business methods, no patents on software or mathematical facts, and patents on mechanical devices must be for a SPECIFIC IMPLEMENTATION, not a general idea of how something works.
Using parts out of my book is one thing, but trying to use my logo is another. Mickey Mouse is a Logo for the Disney company and still a money making product.
Mickey Mouse the character fell under copyright. As a character he could not be considered a trademark. The Disney name, as well as the way it is published can be trademarked - some of their logos made using the mouse-ear silhouette can also be trademarked, but you can't claim concepts like a character as at trademark. It has to be specific words, specific fixed images (like logos), etc.
You also look at China that does not respect any of the trade marks, logos, patenets, or joint venture agreements and you can see why some companies would want to have the dates extended.
We work with a pump company that did a joint venture and has some patteneted pumps that the Chinese are selling to the pump companies compitition and are making in his factory in an after hour shift.
Much of the early US industrial revolution was built upon ignoring such things from the old world too. It's the way starting economies operate. That's beside the point though. Why should whether or not a foreign country ignores the terms matter at all whether or not they get extended. If they're not honoring your 75 year copyright terms they certainly aren't going to obey a 95 year term either. That's similar to passing additional firearms laws hoping criminals (people who by defininition already don't obey the law) obey yet another law. Doesn't help there, just like it won't help here.
This whole system is designed to thwart basic capitalism. Under capitalism, price is based on supply and demand. As supply climbs higher, the price drops lower. Copyrights deal with, at their heart - ideas. Items for which based on their infinite duplicability the supply is infinite. Under the standard capitalistic model, with infinite supply the price would fall to zero (for the information - mediums by which it is transmitted on still have some cost). Copyright is a government construct meant to artificially restrict supply in order to force a cost where there naturally would be none. What we need is a return to SANE copyright and patent laws. Give them 15 years under copyright. Most movies and franchises are going to make their money in that time frame anyways. Take the recent Avatar movie for example: how much of it's total earnings do you think will be realized within the first 15 years of that films existence? The vast majority. After that, remove the copyright protections, and let it pass to the public like so many other works to. All the aforementioned fairy tales, the novel Dracula, The Wizard of Oz (the novel, not the movie), Dante's Inferno, etc. All great works which have rightly passed into public domain. COULD the original author's great-great-great-great-great grandchildren still be making money on them? Sure. Copies of all those are still sold. However, the question isn't COULD there be more money made, it's whether or not they still deserve a governmentally enforced artificial monopoly on the idea. I say no.
PS: Apparently the Italian word for "story" isn't liked by the filters as it gets censored
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