Immeasurably?!?!?! I know I'm a bit of an old fart, but I didn't think that the period of time since the Renaissance could be classified as being lost in the mists of time... What I had hoped my use of sarcasm would suggest is that restricting the flow of information runs counter to the progress of civilization. Had the dissemination of these influential works been prohibited until 75 years after the deaths of the authors, we would very likely not have them at all. Keep in mind that Mozart was born only 41 years after the death of Bach and Beethoven was born before Mozart died. Likewise, it was less than 75 years between the death of Babbage and Aiken's work on the Mark I. (Even though Aiken doesn't seem to have fully grasped Babbage's ideas and their implications, it is clear that Babbage's ideas were part of his inspiration in creating the Mark I.) This is not to say that it would have been impossible for these ideas to have survived in the face of such restrictions. However, the restrictions almost certainly reduce the probability of their survival. I had also hoped that it would be clear that my use of the term "intellectual property" was part of the sarcasm. Until this recent abuse of the term property, it had always been used to refer to that which derived its value to you, then I no longer have that property to use as I see fit. This is not true of ideas and of knowledge. Indeed, the value in ideas is in their influence on other ideas, which only comes through their transmission, not from hoarding them. It helps to keep in mind the context in which patents and copyrights were created. The constitutional phrasing goes: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" This is *not* to give governmental preference to certain commercial enterprises over others, by virtue of their having claimed priority to an idea. At best the crafters of the Constitution would have laughed at such a suggestion. At that time, it was common practice for those who created applications of science in the useful arts to keep their work secret to gain financial advantage over others. This did not promote progress. It was clear that to promote progress, these creations needed to be made public. The limited exclusive rights were basically a bribe to get the authors and inventors to publicly disclose their work. It is also important to remember that when the time frames were put into place, the period of exclusivity was quite a small fraction of the overall life of the invention. The time frames were certainly not directed toward giving the authors and inventors control over the ideas until they were immeasurably old. Unfortunately, this topic has a history of degrading into emotional discussions with ad hominem arguments. So in the interest of not contributing to such a digression, I will attempt to leave this as my last contribution to the discussion. BLS