Mo McRoberts wrote:
On 9-Oct-2009, at 00:21, David Tomlinson wrote:
For obvious reasons I do not wish to discuss children as a subject
anymore.
It’s not obvious at all. People need to stop with the nervousness when
the words “children” and “photograph” appear in a sentence together;
it’s, for want of a better term, childish and ridiculous.
It’s also pretty salient, given it’s a straightforward example of a
copyright-holder having a current ability to exercise control without
having to resort to onerous trust mechanisms.
Your position has a distinct lack of great upsides as compared to the
status quo, but it -does- have some significant flaws, and I say that
retaining the view that copyright as it exists today is flawed in some
fairly serious ways.
No the mention of Children and Photograph just distorts everything it
touches, so there are better examples, where privacy or personal images
are concerned. Copyright is almost useless for controlling something
that does not involve commercial interests in practice.
The fact is that most images are not worth anything unless used
commercially, except to the owner. And that is a privacy and personal
respect issue.
This text is copyright, even if I don't care if someone copies it, but
that is another thing, attribution and source become important, in other
words reputation systems etc.
As for upsides, the only one copyright has, is you are familiar with it.
The Besson and Mason paper covers the accumulation of rights, that forms
a thicket and stops progress (patents). A similar thing applies with
copyright. You can find the copyright owner, the rights clearance
process is complex.
Quintin Tarentino who has resources available talked at length on Radio
4 about the difficulties of getting clearance on original music for films.
Having a designer chair in the background of a shot in a film is a
nightmare. Speaking of films, they also suffer from the monopoly
attributes of runaway costs and marketing so as to limit choice and
exclude competition, and thoose poor A lister have to manage on 20
Million USD per film (2 per year ?).
I have just started to put the case, to do so requires a book.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
Here is one that makes the case, it is available free as a pdf from the
website. But even this does not cover the whole argument in favour of
abolishing copyright and patents.
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