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But I will expand out that rant. Here's another quote from
"The content industries have failed to make the rights-based nature of this controversy clear, preferring economic arguments based on jobs or lost revenues that miss the real point. We should remember that such industries are not entitled to any baseline of revenues, or to exist at all. Perhaps FreeLoading is responsible for billions in losses, as the RIAA and MPAA claim. Or perhaps the RIAA’s critics are correct, that entertainment is a more competitive market than is was in the ‘90s and FreeLoading is not to blame for the free fall in sales.
The truth must be somewhere in the middle. The only claim more ridiculous than the RIAA’s mid-2000s argument, that each pirated album equals a lost sale, is the claim that no pirated copies equal lost sales. The search for objective proof for either claim is a futile one, cursed by hypotheticals and dynamic consumption patterns that are impossible to adequately measure.
Though focusing on the legal rights of individuals may be the best way to ultimately get our arms around FreeLoading, I suspect the content industries are a bit wary of emphasizing the enlightened principles of copyright, as that might expose the great contempt they have shown for such principles. If we begin to focus on the private rights that copyright affords to creators, which incentivize creation, it follows that we would examine the public right copyright simultaneously affords to citizens, to enjoy such creations through the public domain. The content industries would be horrified by a return to the elegant balance, between public and private rights, which copyright policy once satisfied. But, a return to that balance is the only enlightened way forward.
If we can agree to protect creators from digital exploitation, then we must also agree to dramatically scale back copyright terms from the current length: lifetime of the author plus 70 years. As a rights holder who strongly believes in the wisdom of copyright and its need for future protection, I see no reason why an exclusive right to my book should extend for more or less than 50 years total. Taken together, a good faith attempt at rescuing copyright from its current peril includes a search for common sense enforcement, paired with a movement toward the 50 year term or something close to it.
As a sign of such a strategy’s wisdom, we can imagine both Disney and the Google-funded Electronic Frontier Foundation reacting to its elements with apoplectic horror. Because they drive this debate, we get both sides pushing the existing imbalance in policy toward further extremes rather than come together in search of equilibrium. So, today we hear talk of existential disaster from the content industry… and hysterical warnings of censorship from the technology sector."
It's called "holding the moral high ground". If the drivers of copyright (mostly large corporations) had taken the highlighted viewpoint in 1998, there might have been a better outcome. (But I doubt it). But instead the public got DCMA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act (The Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, to some). The result has been civil disobedience, a la Rosa Parks. <Shrug> And the civil disobedience gives people nearly free goodies...
How are you going to stuff the bugle call back into the bugle?
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