> And on the legal front, shouldn't intellectual property laws
> be amended so as to forbid entities that have been selling
> technology from negating the usage value of said technology
> by withdrawing products from the market, withdrawing technical
> support and availability of parts, while retaining the intellectual
> property connected to the discontinued technology?
This reasoning might apply to copyrights, but doesn't apply to patents. The
basic patents on Kodachrome expired 50 years ago (at least). Anyone is free
to manufacture and process Kodachrome film.
There are no physical assets to take over (other than Kodak's coating and
processing machinery). The term "Kodachrome" is another matter. Once Kodak
stops manufacturing Kodachrome, it _should_ lose the right to "Kodachrome"
as a trademark. But the laws no doubt say differently.
> There is no such thing as forced obsolescence of a Stradivarius.
> But there is a colossal amount of forced obsolescence which is
> underpinned in great part by existing intellectual property laws.
The copyright and patent laws have nothing to do with it. Kodak feels the
sales of Kodachrome are not large enough to justify its profitable
manufacture and processing. Perhaps, if they withdrew Kodachrome from retail
sales and sold it directly, via the Web, it would again be profitable.
The decline of Kodachrome's popularity is probably due in part to lack of
patience -- can a professional photographer afford to wait a week to get his
'chromes back, when Velvia, et al., can be processed in a couple of hours?
The fact that reversal films have become obscenely expensive doesn't help,
either. I can get 36 color pictures (film + prints) for less than what an
unprocessed roll of Kodachrome costs. That's nuts. And I'd pay $10 for the
processing. How can slide processing cost more than printing?
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