Z:gnu-www-ja-copyright-versus-community-2000--7e8fe7-Copyright used to be much shor/en

Copyright used to be much shorter in its period or duration, and it's been extended over and over again in the past fifty years or so and in fact in now appears that the owners of copyrights are planning to keep on extending copyrights so that they will never expire again. The US constitution says that &ldquo;copyright must exist for a limited time&rdquo; but the publishers have found a way around this: every twenty years they make copyright twenty years longer, and this way, no copyright will ever expire again. Now a thousand years from now, copyright might last for 1200 years, just basically enough so that copyright on Mickey Mouse can not expire.