Good point. France uses the same postal code layout as the United States. At one job where a data feed only had Zip for userlocation, we would look for suspiciously large numbers of people from Idaho because they have an overlap with the numbers used for Paris.
The government enforces your claim and you pay taxes on anything you earn from it. I bet most IP generates a whole lot more money for the government than enforcing the copyright costs.
You just nailed the difficult balance in copyright law. I agree that life+70 is wayyyyy too long. But you also want to incentivize creators to keep trying to make something of their existing IP. Sapkowski is one example. Another good one is the Dresden Files series, which is 26 books in and still going strong. Each book in the series repeats some of the basics that were covered in the original (often using the exact same phrasing). Then the author extends the story over the course of a few hundred pages. If the original book were already public domain, anybody could write a fairly convincing in-universe book and I have to imagine the author would have moved on to other series.
Personally, I think 50 years strikes the best balance. Everything from the '60s would be fair use, so Spiderman would be public domain but not a wizard named Harry.
This is fascinating! I find it especially interesting to see the solar increase and decrease based on sunshine and what replaces it in the different regions.
I highly recommend the book Accounting For Slavery to anyone even remotely interested in this topic.
You talked about the costs of buying a human being, which is already horrible. But once an enslaved person was owned outright, they were used as collateral in loans to expand operations.
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