On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 03:25:06PM -0600, Todd Walton wrote: > As for me, I'm generally anti-IP, but specifically I can't find > anything egregiously wrong with copyright.
Copyright hampers peoples' ability to utilize their cultural inheritance (previously written books, musical scores, etc.) to create new derivative works. Copyright creates a litigation nightware if anyone violates the *ill-defined* borders of fair-use. Copyright is today used as an instrument of censorship just like when it was originally introduced centuries ago. > If I produce a creative > work, put blood sweat and tears into it, why should somebody profit > from redistributing it without an obligation to pay me for my original > work? First of all, nothing is completely original. Name me any creative work and I'll tell you what it borrowed from. If you borrowed from others why shouldn't others borrow from you? Also, very few people successfully ever make any $$ from copyright. Be honest, how many people do you know that make even beer money from copyright revenue? The reality is that you'd probably be flattered if people were distributing your writings because you probably never expected to make any $$ from it anyway! > Does this mean that creators sometimes don't get what they are due? If you like idea of creators being supported for their works you don't necessarily need copyright to do that. There are other business models. People were creating before copyright and they'd be creating after. Open Source is a good glimpse of what a post-copyright world might look like. Are Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossom, JBoss team, IBM kernel hackers, MySQL team getting 'what they are due' ? Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
