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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
I'm not sure where you saw me saying I thought contract law offered a viable alternative strategy to copyright law, because I don't believe I ever suggested it....
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Let's see, how do I put this politely....
Carefully read posts #59, 62, 64 and the first half of 67. Those are responses to DawnFalcon, who is suggesting that you can replace copyright laws with contracts.
Your comment in #66 is a response to #64, in which I pointed out to Dawn that a contract-only environment does not improve or fix the "copyright duration" problem. Your response -- which quotes part of an ongoing discussion about replacing copyright with contracts -- indicated that you were following this debate. In addition, several of my comments in the second half of #67 addressed your suggestion that lobbyists and legislators will continually pile on extension after extension, when that does not in fact match the historical facts.
Your link doesn't work, but I assume it points what I already know: that the 2 modifications to copyright durations were retroactive and resulted in extending existing copyrights. Meanwhile, the reality is that there have only been 4 rounds of extensions in the US over the last 200 years. Ergo, as I pointed out before, it is not justifiable to definitively assert that round after round after round of extensions is inevitable and utterly unavoidable.
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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Lastly, consider the F/OSS movement: Apparently some people can live with only getting recognition, as well as occasional donations.... so I don't really see the principled argument that teaches us that a world without copyright would not work.
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Oh? As Kolenka also points out, open software licenses
are copyright licenses. Thus, the enforcement of licenses like the GPL are
explicitly based on copyright. So if you abolish copyright, you lose your ability to enforce your open license.
You might make the argument that "free software demonstrates that you don't have to
charge money for your creative output." And I've stated several times that copyright grants you the option to give your content away for free (without worrying about someone else profiting off of it, unless you somehow put it directly into public domain). However, so far it's proving rather difficult (although far from impossible) to
run a viable business with an open source model, even if you start out with that as your explicit goal. Many (if not most) of the big dogs in software are all still proprietary: Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Adobe, EA, etc.
Now, I will agree to some points, namely:
• cost of producing and distributing some types of content will fall
• "free" options (notably ad-supported and promotional use) will continue, and almost certainly become more common
• some businesses will survive, and possibly flourish, using a more open model than current proprietary businesses
But while you can have dozens of amateur writers cranking out fanfics of various quality in their bedrooms and release it for free, it's still going to cost millions of dollars and require scores of professionals to produce the TV series that is the object of said fan's affection. Or, let's take the archetypal rock band; you've got 4 people who are (hopefully) good at writing and performing songs. But this does not mean they are also good recording engineers, know how to master their recordings properly (let alone well), book shows, do promotion in cities where they don't live, set up the equipment and do the sound at live shows, advertise their recordings, design their album covers and t-shirts and graphics, handle their own accounts and taxes, get their songs on the radio, direct their own videos, make CD's, get the CD's into stores or songs onto iTunes, and so forth. At least, if you want to sell more than 5,000 copies and play in clubs with a max capacity of 100, sooner or later you're going to have to get a lot of people to work on your behalf -- and they can't all afford to work for free.
And most of the "free" options just have other ways of making you pay. Broadcast TV is free, but ad-supported. Do you really want your
Harry Potter ebooks to have half-screen ads on every other page? Also, most of the $0.00 Kindle books are set at that price with the intent that if you enjoy that author's work, you will enjoy it enough to subsequently buy other books by that same author.
I.e. there are scores of people, other than the initial creator(s), who are involved in producing and distributing content. Even if it becomes easier for the Lone Genius to produce their works and provide it directly to The Masses, there will always be a need for seasoned professionals who help an artist do their work, and a desire for works more complicated than what one person can produce alone at near-zero costs. You'll still need an orchestra and a chorus to do opera, extras to film movies, marketers to break out of the noise of the masses of free content.... Doing anything more ambitious than a volume of poetry is almost certainly going to require resources and skills far beyond the ability of a single individual to amass.
I.e. even if there is far more free content available in the future, if the quality of said free content rises, and even if today's media titans are destroyed by the technological changes: Paid content, publishers, and other middle-men aren't going to disappear.