Back then, they were really nice and friendly people who were making candles.
If only they could have made electricity illegal...
Seriously, when businesses become useless, they must disappear. The Internet
potentially provides, at any moment, an instant access to any artistic work
ever made. Storing and distributing CDs/DVDs at opening hours largely a
become useless business at the ere of Internet. Majors that control the
distribution the artistic works (as if they were still scarce) too. Even
physical copies have largely become useless.
Unfortunately, every politician wants on her side some of the few thousands
superstars who make millions per months. I cannot even conceive what you
cannot buy with one thousand minimal wages but they seem to not have enough
of it yet. So, they demand that they keep on earning the millions they get
from selling/renting physical or immaterial copies (contrary to 99,9% of the
artists who gets *nothing* on this activity)... and the politicians end up
voting horrible legal things such as the DMCA that prohibits bypassing
horrible technical things such as DRMs (which may make in the HTML
standard!). Not to mention, the huge fines... for sharing one's culture!
Sharing is good. It is the basis of a community. Of a civilization at the
highest scale! Laws should incentive sharing! Assimilating people who share
to pirates who attack ships is wrong. And the copyright was not meant to
prevent sharing. It was meant to protect writers from editors. Not from
readers!
You seem to fear that there will be nothing to share if artists cannot make
money. That may be true to some extent... but that is not happening! For all
artists but the 0,1% of superstars, Internet is a benediction! People who
share copyrighted works on the Internet are those who spend more money on
culture... and, indeed, people spend, year after year, more and more money on
cinema and concerts (from artists they may have never discovered without the
Internet). Several serious studies were made (by "serious", I mean "not paid
by the so-called content industry"). Each one of them shows that
noncommercial sharing of copyrighted works has a positive impact on the
overall market.
Even like that, I can accept the premise that more artists must be able to
make a living from their works. That would be an improvement over the
situation we have known since... the dawn of the ages! Promoting the sell of
copies does not do that. Only superstars get something. Prohibiting sharing
is even worse. Against any moral. What would work is a compulsory tax on
Internet connections that would be cleverly distributed to the artists (i.e.,
the superstars do not get everything). The distribution could even be decided
by the Internet user with a system à la flattr.
And that would work not only for Arts but for everything distributed over the
Internet. Think about free software. Think about journalism. Yes, printing
and selling newspaper in kiosks has largely become useless. But no,
journalists do not have the political powers superstars have. Result:
journalism is dying. I would love to have a button to give a few boxes to the
journalist who wrote an interesting article I found on the Internet.
I am writing too much here. And, to a large extent, to tell the same thing as
BlinkingArrow (I also agree with him about the ever-extending copyright
delay). I stop. :-)
