"Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > This is, of course, not true. Copyright didn't exist in the days of > Mozart and Shakespeare, and yet today's authors, who supposedly have all > of the "benefits" of copyright, have yet to surpass them. There was > monetary incentive for Shakespeare even though his plays weren't > copyrighted: people paid to see them performed, just as people will pay > to watch concerts today. There was monetary incentive for Mozart and > the other great composers of his time: they had wealthy patrons who paid > them to write their music.
But shortly after they died the idea of copyright was sown: the Statute of Anne, 1710. Mozart and Shakespeare may not have caught it, but their descendants surely did. > Companies like Red Hat develop Free/Open Source Software as part of > their core business. Developing under an open source license > essentially eschews any monetary benefit that may come from copyright, > because open source licenses remove the propertarian restrictions that > copyright gives. And yet Red Hat is a profitable company. No, there > are other ways to make money off creations than leaning on > government-granted monopolies, to those who have imagination. Yep, and some even make do with working on jobs that don't use computers. > However, given the proper perspective, it is true that copyrights and > patents would provide some measure of benefit, but this is a much more > delicate balancing act than the corporate sponsors of the dystopian > world we live in would have us think. Exactly. Currently there are too many loopholes with the current model of IP that can open up a bucketful of worms. > Simply increasing the propertarian control copyright grants over ever > longer periods of time has a negative, rather than positive effect on > human creativity, because much human creativity depends on the works of > others. For instance, nearly half of all the animated movies created by > the Walt Disney Company to date have their ultimate origin in some > public domain story (Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Treasure Planet, > Tarzan, and so forth). Their sponsorship of the Sonny Bono Copyright > Term Extension Act may well be killing the goose that lays the golden > eggs. Well, by the nature of control itself, when you tighten the noose, it becomes taut. Ignoring this simple fact has costed many, and has enriched a few. > For patents the situation is even more delicate, because of the radical > differences between the various industries over which it is now deemed > applicable. Indeed, we have utility patents, design patents, and now patents on algorithms. If we keep this trend, it's Orwell's 1984 all over again... >> As we (still) live in a predominantly capitalist society, removing >> these incentives would stifle artistic and technological development. > > How stifled was artistic development in the time of Shakespeare? In > fact, it might even be argued that the *lack of copyright* in his time > was what *enabled* Shakespeare to be as great as he became. Nearly all > of his plays are, like Disney Animated Features, based on other stories > that he did not create himself. Was Shakespeare a ripoff? Only if you > would consider The Little Mermaid a ripoff of Hans Christian Andersen or > The Lion King a ripoff of Hamlet... Come to think of it, everything is a ripoff, including this thread. Philosophically speaking, of course. :) But seriously, most modern generalities we take for granted today are based on abstractions that have been established in the past; televised stories came from radio shows, for instance, and that in turn came from storytelling sessions in pubs around the world. Had Shakespeare been around our time, he might have been hard pressed into making a living out of his plays, simply because we allowed the suits to tighten the noose. > Also, you haven't taken into account the simple fact that it is basic > human nature to create. As a species we've probably been telling > stories and singing songs to each other for hundreds of thousands if not > millions of years. The idea that it will all come to an end just > because people can't get paid to do it is ludicrous. It had been going > on since before there was money, before there was even a concept of > property, and it will go on while the human race endures. And even so when the human race is extinct. That's why IP is just so damn silly. I suspect later alien pundits excavating the human civilization after an eon or so might wonder as to why we have such complexities in place. It's just what like the Jawa on Tatooine said in KOTOR: you will leave the dust, be we will be always here. Ideas will live on, independent of any human imagination, even when all mechanisms seem to fail. -- ZAK B. ELEP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- <http://zakame.spunge.org> 1024D/FA53851D 1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D -- Running Debian GNU+Linux testing/unstable. GnuPG signed mail preferred.
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