Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Let's see, how do I put this politely.... 
Carefully read posts #59, 62, 64 and the first half of 67. Those are responses to DawnFalcon, who is suggesting that you can replace copyright laws with contracts.
Your comment in #66 is a response to #64, in which I pointed out to Dawn that a contract-only environment does not improve or fix the "copyright duration" problem. Your response -- which quotes part of an ongoing discussion about replacing copyright with contracts -- indicated that you were following this debate. In addition, several of my comments in the second half of #67 addressed your suggestion that lobbyists and legislators will continually pile on extension after extension, when that does not in fact match the historical facts.
Your link doesn't work, but I assume it points what I already know: that the 2 modifications to copyright durations were retroactive and resulted in extending existing copyrights. Meanwhile, the reality is that there have only been 4 rounds of extensions in the US over the last 200 years. Ergo, as I pointed out before, it is not justifiable to definitively assert that round after round after round of extensions is inevitable and utterly unavoidable. |
..You must've missed the part where I mentioned the advent of Big Media in your zeal to put words into my mouth. Before 1900 pretty much all you had were book publishers; since 1920 the popular newspaper, movie, tv, and recording industries have pretty much exploded onto the scene, and had a huge impact on the cultural and economic landscape. So in times when there was no possibility of recording stuff, there obviously was less of an incentive for companies to push for legislation protecting that work; ever since the possibility is there, all extensions have been retroactive, meaning everything created after 1920 or so is still under copyright. Ergo, your talking about "the past 200 years" is pointless, as in those 200 years, the media landscape has been vastly changed.
To answer your second point: yes, the GPL etc. make use of existing copyright legislation, but only to ensure people can't take stuff from the PD and steal/licence it themselves. If you take away copyright altogether, you surely take away the enforcement mechanism, but you also take away their right to claim it's theirs. So while companies wouldn't be releasing the source alongside the software, they could never claim the software was theirs, and anyone would be allowed to decompile or whatever it.
The point you seem to be missing is that the most problematic point about copyright is the "time-limited monopoly". While publishers etc. would certainly still be able to publish, print and sell books,
they would not be able to claim a monopoly on the text, nor claim it can't be distributed online.
You don't
need copyright to sell books; why else are publishers still making money off of Jane Austen? Sure, they invent a cover page and say their expression is once again copyrighted, but it's not as though that's the bit that matters. What matters is that they're selling the paper, and people are still buying it.
(Re your silly band example: read those posts by courtney love etc? Bands (
not labels, they just claim they aren't) aren't making money off of CD sales anyway, and even tours organized by Sony et al are pretty hard to make money off of when you're financially stupid. Sure they won't be able to do a "big" tour without help, but then, they won't be going bankrupt being ripped off by the RIAA members either. It seems a win-win.)