On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Crosbie Fitch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> > If you want to own information, keep it to yourself (in your private domain) > - you can't own the copies you give to others or allow others to make. Of > course, you could lobby the legislature to enact such privileges, but > privileges aren't rights.
This problem is exactly the reason we have copyright laws. If you have no control of your information once you release it--why release it? Why publish a book, when anyone can copy it (and resell the copy)? If you have a choice between "sell 10 copies to select individuals who will pay $1000 for it" (because it's scientific and valuable to them) or "sell 1000 copies at $10 each, after which point the copies sold at $2 prevent any more from being sold" why choose Option B? If you're an artist, and have the choice of selling a painting to a private gallery, or to a company that will print copies of it--why allow the copies? If you've done cancer research and make a formula for a new drug, why not just make it yourself, sell it at $400/pill to the few who are wealthy enough to afford it, instead of selling it to a company that will sell it for $2/pill--but you don't get any money for those? If anyone can copy anything, there's no incentive to release your inventions/discoveries/artistic creations to the general public. It works out to just the opposite--if you can control access to your works, you can insist on being paid for them. Without copyright law, the only way to control access is to hide your works. And we all lose out from that, in both creative and scientific fields. Copyright law is supposed to *promote progress* by encouraging people to publish, by limiting other people's rights to use those publications *for a limited time.* That time used to be 14 years: make some profit, and then it's all up for grabs. Then it was extendable for another cluster of years--if you're still raking in money, it was worth re-registering; if not, let it go. Then it got longer. And longer. And covered more stuff. And now... it's not clear if someone could sue someone else for replying to an email without snipping the original out. We have moved past "promote progress by giving an incentive to publish" and into "give ownership of all creative efforts to whichever corporation claims them first." -- "I follow Eris blindly in all things. That She is the Goddess of Chaos simplifies this immensely." -- Christian the Pagan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
