I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
Again, that’s a little outside my realm of expertise, because I’m archiving digital records for companies and organizations – so there’s no question about ownership or copyright, it’s about legal and regulatory compliance (how long you’re allowed to keep a document, etc.).
Personally speaking, I profoundly dislike the idea that works are protected for longer than a human lifetime. It’s hard for society and technology to progress if ideas are locked up by copyright, patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property laws. There are patents that have been registered for which no product has been created for decades – preventing someone from trying to make an idea a tangible thing, and that’s dumb.
If you make a hit song, and you profit from 10 or 20 years of popularity, shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t we encourage people to do more than coast for 20 years on one idea? Shouldn’t the public benefit from that work falling into the public domain? Anyway, we’re way off topic here. :)