> From: Karen Rustad > Um, what? Most people involved in the free culture movement aren't > advocating a return to the pre-copyright era.
Ok. How about a post-copyright era? What do YOU believe most people involved in the free culture movement are advocating? Which aspect of free culture do you believe shouldn't actually be free? And remember, the word 'free' describes people's freedom to enjoy their own culture, not to the anthropomorphological liberty of the cultural artefacts themselves. > The problem isn't the existence of copyright--in a lot of ways, it *can* > "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". The problem IS the existence of copyright. If a few centuries ago you have a handful of printers and a very poor communications infrastructure, then creating artificial monopolies for the benefit of printers *can* appear to incentivise production of publications. The problem is no-one has really thought very hard whether the world would immediately have become a cultural and technological vacuum if copyright (and patents) had never been invented. > The problem is that nowadays copyright seems to impede progress as much as > it promotes it because it's become unbalanced in favor of rightsholders. Au contraire. The problem is that copyright has become ever more strongly enforced against those whose rights it has been corrupted to suspend, i.e. the rights to privacy and liberty of the public (as opposed to commercial publishers). Copyright was supposed to suspend the liberty of printers to print copies of each other's work - for a very limited time in order that they could exploit their monopoly to fund production of books. Given that 99.99% of the population did not have a printer, this was not much of an imposition on the public's right to liberty (or privacy). It wasn't even meant to prevent people building upon each other's work, but that clause got shoved in given you can't build without copying being involved somewhere - and copying became seen as a valuable privilege beyond its use for identical copies. > If you make terms shorter, make the scope clearer, make penalties more > reasonable, etc., copyright would return to benefiting society as a whole. This is like saying that slavery would be far more socially acceptable if only slaves had more humane conditions and shorter terms of service. > If an author can only ever control stuff that they *haven't* > published (and presumably made money off), that's not much of an incentive to > write, is it? In pretty much every other field of endeavour, if you want people to produce great works, you pay them. You don't offer to manacle the hands of all their competitors for a few years. If you are an author with an audience of a million, why not sell your e-book to each of them for a dollar each? That's a million bucks (with no printing or distribution costs). Perhaps last year you sold a book to an audience of a thousand for $10 each? Perhaps the year before that you gave a book away? Why suspend the liberty of your fellow men? Especially when you can't. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
