Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
Copyright is more to benefit society as a whole than it is to benefit any individuals within that society. But does it really benefit society anymore?
It used to. We wanted books to read and we wanted to encourage creative people to write them and copyright does that.
Now we have so many books already and so many more published each year that I wonder why we want to encourage it anymore. Maybe if we stopped copyright only the people who loved to write would publish books and those hoping to make a living from it would find other ways.
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"only the people who loved to write would publish books"? Surely you mean "only people who can afford to spend a significant amount of time on a hobby would publish books".
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
... it's reasonable people wish to read outstanding police procedurals where the detective uses the latest DNA tools, or where the crime is set in a nation-state that didn't exist twenty years ago, or then had a quite different type of government.
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Absolutely. Not to mention the expansion of whose voices and perspectives we get to read, as publishing (slowly) gets more diverse.
Art is a conversation, not just with other art, but with all of society. To take one just example: When I read post-apocalyptic fiction in the 80s, the books took place after a nuclear war. These days, the big threat is environmental, and there's lots of great fiction which deal with that in different ways, both pessimistic and (cautiously) optimistic.