Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
There's a pretty big difference in apple pie and music or ebooks. Apple pie is a physical thing. Music and ebooks are not.
In the days when music came on LP or CD or cassettes and books came on paper the medium was physical and could be resold or kept and that was that. Then came computers and later MP3 files which could easily be copied and redistributed. There was nothing physical anymore. It became something new and different.
Copyright in the days of physical media made sense on the face of it. Copyright in these days of ephemeral media is a very different animal. You're correct that our current system doesn't cover current media very well. Much of it makes no sense. It's overly complex and getting more so as changes are made to try to adapt law to constantly changing media.
Today there are so many huge problems with the copyright system that anyone who has an emotional attachment to it is a bit balmy. And yet it sort of works to protect content much of the time because most of us agree that something is needed and it's all we have so we try to abide by it.
Any emotional attachment to this mish-mosh is a bit obsessive. I think most of us can agree that it's important but it's also pretty ugly. If we're going to make it any better we have to stop loving it and start thinking more clearly about it.
Barry
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Certainly copyright law is one of those situations where the law is way behind the reality of the situation. When you are dealing with digital media, you depend on the good will of the consumers to prevent piracy. Both music and video (movies and TV) are a number of years ahead of books in that regard. Music tried the legal muscle approach and lost big time.
It seems to me that as long as content is legally available in a desirable format at a reasonable price, then true piracy (as opposed to individuals breaking DRM and making use of content for their own personal use such as back up or format shifting) remains either on the fringes or in certain parts of the world. That social contract breaks down when one side or the other gets a bit too greedy (i.e the content providers try to squeeze every penny out of the consumer, or the consumer insists on free content).