[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

In Europe, Art has been subsidized for a long time and a lot of it is created just because we want to further the arts, not make money.

Removing copyright wouldn't remove the ability to make money from the arts--it would just remove the ability to require that the creator has some say in how the art is distributed, and the requirement that the creator gets some of the money.

Copyright was created to keep publishing houses from stealing each others' works by underselling & not paying the authors.

Authors would still write, but they'd have no reason to publish widely, and would have incentives to publish only to small, trusted groups. Same with the other arts. Those who don't care about being famous, but only want to share their art with people they know, wouldn't bother trying for wider distribution.

This is where I believe you couldn't be wronger. The actual costs associated with independent film making are getting smaller and smaller.

There are still costs. And removing copyright protections means that anyone who gets a copy of the movie--by legal means or not--can sell viewings of it, without paying back any of those costs.

Part of why fan-films are made is that even though they aren't expecting to make money, they ARE expecting that nobody else can make money from their work without asking them.

And there's the thing, authors can no longer expect to make a living following their passions, just as a painter can't or a poet.

There's a difference between "can't expect to make money" and "can't stop anyone else from making money from their work."

And if DRM flourished, we would find more and more ways to crack it, more and more ways to distribute freely.

There's plenty of uncracked DRM right now--the kind where you have to be logged into a server to read the content at all. There aren't many people willing to pay a membership fee to get access to DRM'd content to figure out how to crack it.

If one single clean copy exists, then a billion can exist, and we'll make sure they do exist. We won't let your future scenario come to pass. If the content creators want to go that route, then they better hire the brightest and the bold, because you really don't want to piss of the Open Source crowd and their supporters.

The Open Source crowd relies on copyright to protect their right to distribute without charging. Remove that, and corporations who have more money to spend can overwhelm their efforts by grabbing their code and selling the butchered corporate-locked version of it.

One of the reasons Linux got popular is that Microsoft couldn't legally grab it, inflict all sorts of Microcode into it, and distribute it with MS's logo as "THE BEST VERSION OF LINUX," which would fail horribly and convince people that Linux sucked.

It's an interesting thought, but unlikely in your 30 year scenario. We, in all likelihood, won't have libraries in 30 years time (physical that is). And printouts will, if there's any justice in the world, be consigned to a footnote of computer history.

I see you've never lived in a ghetto. Never dealt with schools that keep the same books for 10 years or more, that hold fundraisers to buy fire safety equipment. That keep student records on cards in the office, because they can't afford a computer, and if they could (used computers really are cheap now), can't afford to train anyone on how to use it.

There are still plenty of parts of the US, and many many parts of the rest of the world, where every family does NOT have a computer, and isn't going to in the next 30 years.

There are still areas where electricity is a luxury for the wealthy. (In the US, these areas are very small. In the developing world, they are not.)

And you're saying they'll no longer have libraries?

Copyright doesn't work in favour of the creator, and hasn't since the first ridiculous extensions.

Then roll back the extensions. Make it 28 years, with an option for 28 more, and that's it, and do the same to existing works as was done with the extensions: have it apply retroactively to everything. Put everything before 1953 in the public domain, and give everything before 1928 about 5 years to re-register, or it goes into the public domain.

There's a BIG difference between "modern copyright is so flawed it's hurting more than it's helping" and "all copyright law is useless."

Now it cannot work in a zero-cost, infinitely replicable culture. The content hoarders like Disney and all the other Mega-Hyper-Corps in their rush to control everything, ruined copyright forever.

Why? What would be ruined if the law were scaled back to the proportions it had a hundred years ago?

But they also opened the doors to absolutely free culture. A culture that knows no price, that is created out of joy rather than money.

That culture works on the premise that nobody else can make money from your efforts, either.

Right now, Disney can't grab your short stories & make movies from them. Are you granting them that right? Do you put your works out, not as CC works, but as public domain works?