Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
The computer has effectively killed copyright. Shall we kill the computer to keep copyright intact? Who knows what tommorrow's changes will obsolete. All I know it, it will obsolete something. And somebody is going to lose because of it.
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I don't think copyright is dead, but how it can be applied is changing.
It's still difficult to set up a business selling other people's copyrighted works without permission. (At least, it's difficult to do so if those works are less than 50 years old. Older works just aren't carefully watched, except for a few high-profile cases.) It is, however, increasingly easy to copy works for free, and it's never going to get harder to do so.
Definitely a key point to keep in mind: Digital copies will never be harder to make than they are right now. Future applications of copyright law need to acknowledge that.
Copyright may shift to a system where only economic control is permitted, and free use is unrestricted. (I don't think that's a good idea.) Or publishers may offer bells-and-whistles versions that are hard to reproduce--ebooks with links to a verified website with author interviews or additional, non-downloadable notes; interactive movie DVDs that require info set by the seller at time of purchase. But those won't dissuade customers who just want the basic book or movie content.
One of the first things ebook publishers need to do to counter piracy, is to make sure their versions are BETTER than scanned-and-OCRd versions thrown around on the darknet. If the mainstream published version looks no different from the bootleg, there's a lot less incentive to put up with DRM; combine that with "oh, you can't transfer it to your new computer" and people will go looking for the pirate version.
Another potential solution is changing the penalty system for copyright infringement--marking a difference between individual misuse and corporate exploitation. A penalty of $50 per file wouldn't create the furor and martyrdom that the current range of penalties does ("hey look! I moved 783 kb of text from one computer to another and now I'm worth $150,000 to the right person!"). Treat minor copyright infringement like petty theft, punish accordingly, and stop turning low-grade hackers into folk heroes who can claim to have caused $2mil of economic chaos.