Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy
I think most of the time, when people argue for the removal of copyright law, what they're really arguing for is the removal of CURRENT copyright law. The original intent of attempting to balance the interests of both sides in order to encourage more creation is a valid concept. But the current implementation of that concept is horribly flawed.
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Agreed, yes. But arguing it should be removed, without offering something to take its place, is part of what makes authors, artists & publishers so paranoid and unwilling to consider new business models.
Baen's doing well, and isn't having to abolish current copyright law to do so. So's Doctorow. Both those models--cheap ebooks w/o DRM, and creative commons releases--are effective economic models, but so obscure that mainstream publishers are certain they won't work for them.
The ebook world seems to be at an impasse... as long as most popular books are released in DRM'd formats, they get bought, stripped, and released to the darknets (or scanned & OCR'd & released to the darknets), and publishers think that would be more common if the digital form were less protected. As long as they think of every e-copy being one less print copy sold, they'll fight viciously to prevent unpaid digital copies.