[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by gweeks

Having had discussions with new hires just out of college and kids just graduating from high school I was appalled at the general opinion about copyright. I expect copyright to be dead in 20 years or less. None of the young people I've talked to have any respect for copyright at all.

James Boyle, law school professor & copyfight activist, one of the founders of the Creative Commons movement, wrote The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (free legit download) points out (emphases added):

It used to be relatively hard to violate an intellectual property right. .... Imagine someone walking up to you in 1950, handing you a book or a record or a movie reel, and saying “Quick! Do something the law of intellectual property might forbid.” …You would have been hard-pressed to do so. .... triggering the law of intellectual property would be genuinely difficult. Like an antitank mine, it would not be triggered by the footsteps of individuals. It was reserved for bigger game.

This was no accident. The law of intellectual property placed its triggers at the point where commercial activity by competitors could undercut the exploitation of markets by the rights holder. Copying, performance, distribution—these were things done by other industrial entities who were in competition with the owner of the rights: other publishers, movie theaters, distributors, manufacturers. .... The public was not at the table, needless to say, and the assumption was that to the extent there was a public interest involved in intellectual property law, it was in making sure that the industries involved got their act together, so that the flow of new books and drugs and movies would continue. Members of the public, in other words, were generally thought of as passive consumers of finished products produced under a form of intraindustry regulation that rarely implicated any act that an ordinary person would want, or be able, to engage in.

Copyright law wasn't designed for individuals; it's a form of corporate regulation intended to allow a flourishing entertainment and education industry. It was never meant to be relevant to college students, except in the sense of "someday I might be published, and when that happens, copyright law will let me choose the terms I'll accept in exchange for publication."

The problem is that the law hasn't caught up with the technology--the law was based on the premise that copies were expensive to produce, and therefore the only way to make copies that competed with authorized ones, was with a corporation's resources--printing press, movie theatre, sound studio, etc. A single person hand-copying chapters of a book to mail to his friend in the army wasn't worth noticing. Neither was the "copying" of music involved when someone sang a popular song at a dinner party.

Now, however, the casual copying that people have *always* done, has become instantly sharable worldwide, and instantly reproducible effectively for free. And the law never had a specific exemption for noncommercial copying done by individuals--because when the laws were designed, those copies were so rare as to not need specific mention.

Of course most people are oblivious to copyright law. It wasn't designed to matter to them. How much do most individuals know about commercial kitchen health regulations? Would they think that if they have friends over for dinner, even if they're not charging, they're "in the food industry" and therefore should have to match those standards? If the friends each offer to pitch in $10 for pizza and beer, does that make the host an illegal restaurant?

Copyright law is an aspect of corporate business law that's suddenly been inflicted on individual activity, and most individuals are quite reasonable in their desire to ignore it. The growing encroachment of business law into casual interpersonal life is just surreal.