Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
No one in this thread has yet proposed a better model than copyright and monetary payment for managing the competing desires from the above paragraph. I certainly think that the particular implementation of copyright that we have today (in the US) is quite far from achieving its goals as stated in the US Constitution. That's not an indictment of the idea of copyright, but rather of the form it has taken by way of lobbyists and the gang of 535 (a.k.a the US Congress).
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Well, here's a thought: maybe the problem is that copyright itself is beginning to fail. It could be that copyright is technologically unsustainable.
If this is true, perhaps we are falling back into the pre-copyright environment. But the rub is that the entry costs to the publishing business - the ones that used to exist, like buying a printing press & needing physical inventory & a sales force or distribtion network - have themselves been eliminated by technology. So maybe the pre-copyright environment itself has been destroyed by technology.
So whatever better model there might be could well be something that cuts loose entirely from the concept of copyright.
Not that I have such a model to propose. I do think that the model would involve branding. Another aspect of the model would be some kind of added value. The question is, whether any of that would show up on the hardware side, the software side, or the content side of the product.
It could be that the economic environment would grow different models if copyright were off the scene. Perhaps at this point, copyright is not only obsolete, but a barrier to a better system.
BTW, your description of the "region problem" struck me as exactly the problem faced by the pharmaceutical industry. And the parallel is the patent system.