Today is a great day for Goats.

With the financial backing of the entire entertainment industry behind us we can now maintain the copyrights on Goats until at lease 2087-ish. How we're going to make money off of this when we're ~115 years old is somewhat unclear to me, but if both Congress and the Supreme Court agree [stanford.edu] that we need copyrights for that long, then it must be true.

While good for Goats, I tend to echo Dan Gillmor's opinion [siliconvalley.com] and am also sickened by this ruling....hence posting to Ring of Fire.

More links can be found here [corante.com].

I find this extremely disturbing, but for a completely unrelated reason.

From the U.S. Copyright Office site [copyright.gov]:

A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is ordinarily given a term enduring for the author's life plus an additional 70 years after the author's death.

Which, by your math, means that I have only 14 years to live.

Do you have plans you haven't told me about, Phillip?

In Response to jon (#3627):

I decided that it would be easier to add 90 to 1997. If that means you only have 14 years left to live, then so be it.

The sad part of this is that I don't think that the Supremes ruled unfairly on this one. I don't think they made the ruling with much regret, but their job is to interpret and apply the constitution, and they did.

Blame for this should be firmly placed on the shoulders of our corporately-owned congressmen and the writers of the constitution, who foolishly created a document subject to interpretation in the belief that our government would always act in the best interests of its people.

In Response to phillip (#3628):

How does Phillip's co-authorship, in the sense of at least the Post-It strips, affect these calculations?

Does that mean Phillip also only has 14 years to live?

In Response to zamphir (#3631):

Phillip was supposed to croak at 25, so he's already living on borrowed time.

In Response to jon (#3633):

Croak?

Or get deported?

In Response to zamphir (#3639):

ah...if only I were french, then I could make really bad jokes.

Although I suppose that would only be encouraging them.

In Response to phillip (#3640):

We can make Scandinavian jokes too. And we don't even need any encouragement. (Threats to get us to stop are also taken lightly).

Like this one:

Ole's Famous Spicy Hot Sauce
Vell, virst you take von quart of plain yoghurt.
Then you add von quart of sour cream.
Then you add von quart of clotted cream.

Now, if that's too hot for you, yust leave out the yoghurt.

In Response to jon (#3629):

Well, technically that's what the goverment does, as long as you change "best interests" to "stupid interests," and change "people" to "voting constituency."