Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Here's what would happen if all copyright ceased to exist tomorrow:
Nothing.
I would still write my stories, so would Stephen King. Young, hungry film directors would still make their cheap films. Actors would still act. Musicians would still pick up their guitars and compose love songs. The world would continue to spin, and art would still be made.
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Overnight? Very little would change. Over the next thirty years? Plenty would change, because artists would have no financial incentive to share their works widely. Why publish a book, with all its setup costs, when anyone can grab it & re-publish it cheaper--if nothing else, without the editing and selection process the original went through? Why go through the expense of making a movie, when you can't have any assurance of getting back the costs and making a profit?
All screenwriters certainly aren't going to act, direct & produce movies on their own. They need a team, and a lot of equipment, to make their idea into a public-viewable presentation. Who's going to pay for all that? Only those who can afford to do it in their leisure time?
Performing artists would have a great time. One reason that many bands didn't get behind DRM is that they like to play, not sell CDs; they're content to get paid enough to live on by being on stage. Authors don't have that option; selling copies is their only way to make a living at their craft. Or, of course, they can make a living assembling motherboards, and work on their craft in the evenings, if they've got the energy.
Artists would be limited to those who are able to charge for a performance, or can afford to produce their works for free, or for random unknown amounts of money. And they'd have no incentive to produce publicly--quite the opposite; patronages with strict exclusion contracts might become common.
Of course, digital copies are easy to produce & distribute, so there'd be no reason not to share those. But DRM would also become more common, and more types of it would flourish--without the requirement of fair use, and the right to own one's purchases, materials would be distributed under "Usage Licenses" controlled by the creator or, more likely, a third-party software company. And even free digital copies would work to deepen the cultural divide between families wealthy and educated enough to use computers, and those without those resources.
Inner-city libraries in poor neighborhoods would stock up on letter-sized printout binders of works from the web. Eew.
I agree that copyright as it stands is seriously broken; it hinders more creativity than it encourages, and it's got a stranglehold on our history. However, that doesn't mean it should be removed entirely; we still need the protections copyright was created to grant. We just need to figure out how to grant those protections without blocking huge amounts of creative and sharing efforts.
I love Lessig's idea of making noncommercial derivatives entirely legal, and having much less protection against either noncommercial copies or commercial derivatives. That premise is a good start for sorting out how the law needs to change.