With the recent lawsuit between NCSoft and Bluehole studios, copyright laws have come to the attention of many gamers. The problem is that over time, copyright laws have been changed and strengthened to absurd lengths and it kills the ability for people to come up with new ideas because companies try to take advantage of copyright laws to make money. They are no longer trying to innovate and create new ideas. It has lost its original purpose and needs to be changed.

1) The Original Copyright Law

The original copyright law came from the US Constitution and gave people who came up with new ideas potentially 30 years or so to profit from their creations. 30 years was essentially the lifetime of the person (most people died under 50 at the time). Nowadays, our average life is around 70 years so they extended it by the same amount. Once the copyright expired, it entered into the public domain and anyone could use it. The problem is that the extensions have made it impossible for much of it to be reused. Nowadays, copyright has to be extended into international areas to work. The US Patent Office is no longer valid because the world is coming up with new ideas and the people who come up with it should be recognized outside of their own country.

The world needs an international copyright office and people need to be able to prove that they came up with those ideas. No bullcrap with fake companies like Steve Jobs and Apple. A company needs to prove that they actually came up with those ideas. It should be located in a real office and not some Post Office Box in some rural office. Heck, even someone's house is better. Patent trolls should lose the rights to all their stuff.

2) Exploiting Copyright

Many companies have tried to take advantage of copyright laws to benefit themselves. Some people buy the rights to obscure things and hope that they can sue someone to make money off of it. This should not be what is happening. Copyright is suppose to help develop new ideas or new ways to use something old, but this is no longer the case. Large companies also own the rights to the creation of their employees rather than share it. When a musician records their music, the studio usually owns it rather than the musicians. The problem is that most of the studios are part of a large organization that makes it nearly impossible for people to record their music without being in one of their studios. If the artist wrote their song and composed the music to it, it should belong to them and not the studio. The studio is only used to record the song and they have to front like $50,000 to use it. Why should studios even own the rights to it?

3) Patents

Patents are a bit different from copyright because it tends to be a process more than just words. It tells other people how the process is done in exchange for being able to use it and profit from it for a certain amount of time. Eventually, others will be able to use it. Unfortunately, this means that others can try to improve on your idea or try to recreate it and own the patents to the new ideas so companies are more reluctant to do it. Unfortunately, having trade secrets means that there is no protection as opposed to having a patent protection. This is of course, their own fault for not registering it as a patent.

Another problem is that people are intent on registering extremely general patents with the hopes that they can sue someone. There was the time that one company tried to claim that it invented MUDs in like 1997 and that NCSoft was in violation of it. That is an example of the absurd because MUDs were around in the 1980s already and they did not create it. Some companies are also trying to copyright stuff that is already considered to be what is in the "public domain". Things have become too common overtime such as wireless devices and those patents should become invalid for being "not specific enough". Unfortunately, they remain valid resulting in stupid lawsuits like Apple trying to sue companies for money.