I've been thinking about the concepts of intellectual property protection more and more lately, especially with regard to software. As we progress in the current directions of technological development, many more fields will soon find that their various special purpose hardware will be implemented in software, run on a small number of general purpose machines.

Because of this, we know that software must be a protected entity in our society. But how should we protect software, and for how long? This is the truly difficult question.

Counter to all the recent grumblings in the software community over copyrights being 'too long', I've begun to wonder whether very long is not also very good. In fact, don't long copyrights spur innovation precicely because it is so hard to produce something similar? Aren't we forcing people to come up with new things constantly because they're not allowed to take advantage of the old things?

There are so many arguments both ways, it's hard to keep them all in mind at once and weigh them together. But I think that this point may have been overlooked by many. If copyright terms are too short, we may be running the risk of disincentivizing innovation, rather than nurturing it.