Quote:
Originally Posted by Andurian
When copyright was put into place, copyright pretty much only protected the incomes of authors (and the publishing houses they chose to work with) because anyone wanting to pirate their works would have to pay for the media to distribute the works on. Which means that copyright outlawing piracy didn't hurt the media consuming public much at all, since pirates would be charging close to the price of the original author.
Modern circumstances are different - copyright laws *do* hurt the media consuming public, since there is little to no distribution cost. Modern pirates charge nothing at all.
Not to say I'm wholeheartedly against copyright as a means to protect authors (certainly *something* needs to keep authors producing new books), but saying "the issue was decided a hundred years ago" fails to observe that the facts on the ground are different now.
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I definitely agree that excessive copyright hurts the media consuming public, but I do think that some form of copyright is necessary in order for the media consuming public to have somehting to consume.
Having only public or private financing of authors instead of copyright would put a layer of censoring that should not exist.
I've found what I was refering to, at last !
It's said far better than I could say it, and I do think that a good part of it still applies nowadays.
This link includes the text of Macaulay speeches on copyright, in 1841-1842 :
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
(Additional link with the same text, and some footnotes :
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329)
The situation has changed in some ways, of course, but we still need an incentive for authors to write, and this shouldn't be controlled by public or private funding.
Copyright allows an author to retain ownership of his work, and to use as he sees fit. If no publishing house wants to publish it, he can self-publish on the web, make it available for free, use a tip-jar, ....