Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Copyright (yes, back to the point of the thread. Ha ha!) was invented by men who believed that content, ideas themselves, had value, and needed to be protected as much as manufactured inventions. Copyright served to protect the author whose books were printed by another publisher without his consent, and without compensation. And it worked, because people and governments agreed to enforce that protection.
Only when (or if) governments, backed by the public, come to an agreement that e-books, regardless of their method of delivery, deserve protection, can we expect copyright to mean anything in regard to e-books. I believe the public can be brought to understand that it is within their best interests to recognize e-books as objects of value, just like a paper-bound book, because they both carry valuable content. Not all the public is there yet... no one has yet made the compelling argument, the "Common Sense" doctrine, that everyone accepts... but I believe it will come.
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Steve, I believe it will never come. I say that because the world of copyright has
changed, and it'll never be the same again. It has changed because the
method of production in the digital world has changed. The old rules just don't work the same way in the new world. I stated that back in my first post here (and why), way back when.
In the old mass-production world, it took a lot of capital to make something, which limited the number of manufacturer to a small number, and made the amount at legal risk to be sizable. The reward for pirating was not worth risk (in invested capital), so nobody did it. (They
did do it in the patent world, because the returns often
were worth the risk (study the history of the variable intermittent windshield wiper patent, for example.)) The copyright law was (in essence) self enforcing.
In the digital world there are at least 100 million manufacturing machines owned by individuals, most of which cost less than a weeks typical wages. There is no way to control the use of these manufacturing machines, short of shutting down Western civilization. That's a cold reality (like Tom Goodwin's story "The Cold Equations"), like it or not. The copyright laws are now virtually impossible to enforce in the digital realm. (Yes, you can stand a few people up and (figuratively) shoot them, but that still isn't going to stop the change. (Just like drug laws haven't stopped drug use, immigration laws haven't stopped illegal immigration, ect.))
This doesn't mean I'm a pirate or condone piracy, I'm just measuring reality, whether I like it nor not.