Comment by jmward01

Patent, trademark, copyright, etc are all supposed to benefit society as a whole. The point isn't that corporations get to lock things away forever. The goal is to incentivize innovation, both technological and cultural. The more companies make the argument that 'thing x from a long time ago is crucial to us now' the more I think that our current IP laws are actually slowing down innovation instead of incentivizing it. Maybe we need a new system that starts costing money after a point to maintain IP rights. That system would recognize the value taken by private companies holding on to old IP to the detriment of society and force them to come up with new things to justify their existence instead of living off of that one thing they did right 100 years ago.