Mike, I couldn't agree more on the undesirability of software patents. In relation to your customers who want to be able fully to audit the provenance of code they use in their products etc, at the moment the lifetime of copyright is excessively long compared to the purpose of copyright (i.e. to incentivise the creation of new creative work) in relation to software. Would any software now created not be created if the copyright term were reduced to 5 years ? How many software products unmaintained for 5 years are ever sold ? The benefit of reducing the term to as short as needed is that when a project becomes increasingly popular and the lead maintainer of it needs to tighten up assurance of legally binding copyright signoff from contributors, the project can move from a legally uncertain state to a legally fully auditable state within the much shorter term e.g. of 5 years. With copyright terms of many decades, frankly I think fewer project maintainers will bother, consequently excessive copyright terms are an impediment to improving the auditable asset quality in connection with software projects which started out on an informal basis. So overlong copyrights are an impediment to the formation of intellectual property assets in connection with software.