Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Further, even if it is an objective evil, its hard to see how that evil exceeds the evil of ignoring the social contract; far less harm is done by waiting for 100 years for a book to enter the public domain than is done by the breakdown of the social contract that ignoring copyright law represents.
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I disagree, strongly. The current copyright laws encourage works to fall out of print and into obscurity, impoverishing the culture as a whole. These laws also enforce an unfair standard by which content companies (e.g. Disney) are able to take advantage of common cultural content now in the public domain, while ensuring that their own contributions to culture (such as they are) cannot similarly be incorporated into new works, further undermining the implied social contract of fairness. An environment is created in which many people cease to care about the contractual rights of authors, because they perceive that the whole system is unfair. I am not advocating piracy, but I find it unsurprising that pro-piracy attitudes exist given the current imbalance of legal protection for content "owners" vs. consumers.