Quote:
Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer
Saying it would be wrong to remove an author's income stream is: (i) a straw man; and (ii) ridiculous on its face. It's a straw man because very few people are arguing that copyright should be reduced to less than the author's life time, so there would be no impact on his or her personal income stream. It is also ridiculous on its face because it suggests that authors have some right to income from their works that is outside of those rights created by copyright, and that's not the case - copyright is providing rights (a time limited monopoly) where they wouldn't exist otherwise.
Also, you're right that their will be winners and losers, but generally you want to have more winners than losers. War is never bad for everybody, but you still want to see less of it. And again, a reduction in copyright doesn't have to be "arbitrary" if your goal is to determine what creates the most economic benefit generally, not just for a few very prolific authors.
Your post also makes the incorrect assumption that authors get no benefit from the works of others. Infinite copyright would harm consumers and writers equally as it would prevent consumers from accessing many works and would prevent writers from reusing expressions or remixing ideas of decades past (or I guess centuries past if we go with infinite copyright).
The idea of infinite copyright is so bizarre that I feel like I'm arguing an Onion article.
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I'm not arguing for infinite copyright. All I
ever argued was that any copyright law is arbitrary. 20 years, 28+28, Life+50, Life+75. They are all arbitrary lines drawn in the sand for what we will protect. Jeesh.
And it
is arbitrary. You even bring that out in your statement "..
if your goal is to determine what creates the most economic benefit generally". The U.S. Constitution doesn't say "To promote the Greatest Possible Economic Benefit Generally, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." And yet, you would use that as the basis for selecting the copyright term. Any measure is arbitrary. Sure, we can select a measure, and we can build models that intend to maximize that value. But the measure itself is arbitrary. There's simply no way around that.
And I would say that there are plenty of people that argue for something less than life. Somebody posted a paper earlier that argued that the optimal copyright term was only 15 years. That definitely cuts into the income of many popular writers. And once you get that short, it's just a sliding continuum of impact.
Sometimes I hate getting into discussions on the internet. I comment on an aspect of an argument that I believe is flawed, and then in the course of supporting my statement, I get sucked into a side of an argument that I really don't have a stake in. I'm going to attempt to resist commenting further.