Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
The internet situation is very different: There are no subsidies for content creators, and there are no tools in place to keep people away from content they want (at least, nothing that works well). If content like ebooks had a guaranteed source of profit, like ad subsidies, govt subsidies, or ways to keep freeloaders from accessing content without paying, copyright would quite possibly not be needed at all.
Since ebooks and other digital content don't have these things, we need copyright laws to provide them.
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But the copyright laws have never stopped people from pirating them, and never will. Even if you removed every pirate file from the internet they would still get passed around some other way. I can remember people selling photocopies of rare books at comic marts in the 80s, so it's not exactly a new problem that there pesky internet has brought along.
In the UK, writers get a few pence each time a book is borrowed from the library. We also had something called the Arts Council that would give people a grant to live on while they created something. Either, or both of those applied to independent creators of digital content would be a lot cheaper than continuing the "war" on piracy that will never be won. It could also be funded through lottery money (aka the gullibility tax), instead of that money going to wealthy organisations that don't really need it.