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Originally Posted by Shaggy
It's already being discussed.
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By whom? I have never seen anyone even suggest, with the slightest degree of seriousness, the idea of scanning every email sent with the intention of identifying copyright violations, which is the scenario Engstrom depicts. I'm not even sure such a thing would be possible in the EU, which has stricter privacy laws than the US.
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Originally Posted by Shaggy
The standard argument to that is artists survived for a long time before copyright existed. Some of the greatest composers and artists created their works before the existence of copyright....
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Copyright has been around for over 300 years; there wasn't really a need for it before the invention of the printing press. So I'm not really sure which pre-copyright era you're discussing, or how it's relevant to an era with mass production as well as mass distribution and mass piracy. For example, I can't imagine that patronage of the arts by the Roman Catholic Church is relevant, preferable or even workable in contemporary society.
To be clear about one point though, I would not say that "all creativity will come shuddering to a halt." However if artists are unable to get compensated for their works, they won't be able to continue producing those works, particularly works that require extensive resources and labor (e.g. movies).
And in particular, the Pirate Bay has profited by its facilitation of copyright violations, and as far as I can tell they have never distributed a single cent to any content creator. (Doing so would be a snap, since they know exactly how many times a given torrent has been downloaded.) How is that a sustainable model for the artists?