On Oct 23, 2007, at 7:24 AM, Johannes Gebauer wrote:
I know this post is going to be a little controversial, and I am by no means an expert on copyright. Anyway, I'd like to point out that copyright, originally, was actually there to protect the artist.
This is true in Europe, but not in America. The political philosophers who founded America's legal system explicitly rejected that tradition, along with many others they perceived as unjust privilege antithetical to their ideal of individual liberty.
In America, copyright is re-founded on the notion of the public good. This basis is clearly stated in the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution (article 1, section 8, paragraph 8), without which any copyright restriction at all would be in violation of the First Amendment.
But of course, the concept in the late 18th century and the reality in the early 21st are two entirely different things.
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