No. The US constitution was a lot more forward thinking than people give it credit for, securing works for a LIMITED TIME is explicitly stated and there's a reason for that. Disney in particular has made a killing releasing copyrighted products based off public domain, and it extends far beyond the obvious ones like Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, etc.
We have ALWAYS lived in a culture where reusing older works in newer ones has been a driving force for creativity. I just went to a play a friend helped put on a couple weeks ago called Heddatron, a mashup of Hedda Gabler, a telling of Ibsen's life, comedy and robots. The whole thing made absolutely no sense to me, but it was amusing as hell to watch. Hedda Gabler came out in 1890, if our current copyright laws applied to his work it would still be under protection and there's a good chance it would have never come to light.
We don't need to grant MORE protections to IP, we need to severly reduce the copyright terms back to sane levels.
We have ALWAYS lived in a culture where reusing older works in newer ones has been a driving force for creativity. I just went to a play a friend helped put on a couple weeks ago called Heddatron, a mashup of Hedda Gabler, a telling of Ibsen's life, comedy and robots. The whole thing made absolutely no sense to me, but it was amusing as hell to watch. Hedda Gabler came out in 1890, if our current copyright laws applied to his work it would still be under protection and there's a good chance it would have never come to light.
We don't need to grant MORE protections to IP, we need to severly reduce the copyright terms back to sane levels.