MaximumPC 2008 08

Copyright expiration seems to be out there in the

distant future, along with fl ying cars and giant

Tokyo-destroying robots. It takes so long for works

to pass into the public domain in the United States

that waiting for them seems futile, unless you’re a

big fan of silent movies and barbershop quartets. But

this situation isn’t universal. The international law on

copyright, aka the Berne Convention, lets countries

set shorter limits.

Some are as short as 50 years, so just most

of you will be dead or too old to care when this

column enters the public domain in Argentina. All

of you will be dead (or at least have your heads

frozen) when it does so in the U.S.

Go ahead, I give you my permission—take my

column in 2058. Screw 2103.

Long terms are silliest in software. Microsoft

gets to keep making mad money from its fi rst DOS

for 68 more years. Right now, America’s only term-

expired computer program was probably written by

Ada Lovelace.

There’s a growing collection of public domain

works online these days hosted in shorter-term

countries all over the world. Project Gutenberg,

Librivox, and the Internet Archive all store content

outside the U.S. that is still copyrighted here, but

a search can land you in Australia violating U.S.

copyright without you ever knowing it. F. Scott

Fitzgerald, anyone? Google, it seems, has borne us

back ceaselessly into the past.

But what should copyright actually be? Who does

better, the longer or the shorter term countries?

Rufus Pollock, a Cambridge University

economist, actually ran the numbers on optimal

copyright. He sat down to fi nd out what period gave

creators enough time to make a living and provided

society with the best benefi t. It turned out to be

14 years, the same term America started out with

in 1790. Seems the founding fathers were pretty

smart after all.

Another paper from Cornell University made

a public benefi t argument for infi nite copyright—

but with re-registration every 15 years, putting

everything but the most profi table works in the public

domain. Disney could have Mickey Mouse—I wanted

Galaga more, anyway.

BYTE RIGHTS

Know Your Term

Limits

QUINN NORTON

Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired

News and other publications. Her work has

ranged from legal journalism to the inner life

of pirate organizations.

12 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|AUG 08 |www.maximumpc.com

QUICKSTART^

THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL

Steam, Valve’s popular digital distribution

platform for games, is about to get a host of

new features, including online storage and

syncing for your save games and a system

requirements checker.

The Steam Cloud is by far the most exciting enhancement. The cloud

will store your save games and confi guration info on Steam’s servers,

allowing you to access your personal settings from any computer that’s

logged into Steam. For anyone who games on more than one PC, this is

a killer feature—you won’t have to root around in your Steam folder to

fi nd saved games anymore. Unfortunately, Steam Cloud will work only on

games designed for it—Valve expects Left 4 Dead to be the fi rst new title to

support the Cloud.

Also announced was a system requirements tester, which will compare

your system to the massive database of system confi gurations collected in

the Steam hardware survey to determine what kind of performance you can

expect from your rig for any given title in the Steam library. -W S

GAME ON

Valve Announces Steam Enhancements

A

t the Wall Street Journal’s D conference,

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer off ered a

fi rst tantalizing look at Windows 7—the

next version of Windows. We haven’t seen the

full UI yet, just glimpses of future functionality,

including iPhone-style multi-touch control and

a radial menu.

The multi-touch functionality that Ballmer

and Gates demoed on a Dell Latitude XT laptop

looked remarkably similar to the Microsoft

Surface, the tabletop computer Microsoft is

developing for information kiosks and hotel lob-

bies. In addition to a Surface-esque photo-man-

agement app, they demoed an onscreen piano,

a multi-touch paint app, and an impressive

mapping app, which featured radial menus.

Radial menus are essentially mouse

gestures that use visual guides to help the

user navigate more complex menus. Until

now, we haven’t seen this power-user feature

in mainstream apps, aside from a few games

and browser plugins. It’s much too early to

start judging Windows 7—rumor is, it will

be released in late 2009 or early 2010, at the

soonest—but we’re happy to see anything new

from Microsoft. -W S

Ballmer and Gates Unveil Windows 7

iPhone-style multi-touch support confirmed for the next

version of Windows

First Look

Windows 7’s radial menus will take the place of

nested drop-down menus.

Windows 7’s photo browser bears a striking

resemblance to the Surface demos we saw

last year.

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