[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Yes, authors don't "need" to sign exclusivity contracts, but when the choice is between signing or not being published.. exclusivity is demanded, not asked for in a silky tone of voice by a kindly old lady after she's given you the money.

If I am reading your argument correctly, though, the publishers are "parasites" who offer nothing of value. So why would you accept their terms? Small media companies, with a fraction of the power of the big houses, have existed for decades. Certainly in this day and age, it's not necessary; e.g. you can self-publish without granting any exclusivity via Scribd, Smashwords, Amazon and many other services.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

The fact that slave-owners could act with impunity vis-a-vis their slaves had nothing to do with the fact that 1. they had a socially superior position, and 2. they had the legal right to do whatever they want, and 3. they had the money (earned by their slaves' labor) to lobby to keep the status quo? That really is a politically naïve argument to make.

No, it's an awareness of where the actual problems lie.

If you have a contract to pay me X amount of a product I designed, and you fail to pay me and engage in all kinds of shenanigans to avoid paying what you owe, the problem doesn't lie in patents or copyrights. It's in the fact that you are failing to fulfill your contract. Similarly, if I sign a contract that ends up with me losing money and you earning it, that's not a copyright issue; it's a contract issue.

This is not to say that copyright is never abused; rather, that on the balance it offers extensive and flexible protections to everyone, regardless of their status.

Copyright is not slavery, and the mere suggestion is hyperbole. No one is forced into signing a contract; if you don't like the terms, and you sign anyway, that's your own fault.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Copyrights are what allowed those companies to earn money to get to the position of relative power versus the individual creator/musician/whatever; now that they have that money, and they can say "look, we can make or break you", the individual is screwed.

Isn't part of your argument that these companies offer nothing of value in the first place? If so, why can't individuals avoid them altogether? Oh wait, they can. They can go with a smaller publishing house or record label or movie studio, or self-distribute their work.

Copyrights are part of what has allowed media companies to thrive or just survive. It also takes business savvy, the ability to gather and manage financial resources, and perhaps most crucially, the ability to actually sell what content creators are making. And many of these companies formed and developed their capacities well before copyright terms were anywhere near as long as they are now.

And it also takes some guts. Media companies need to accept significant financial risks -- and often pay for those risks. Media companies are not exactly the darlings of Congress, either; they are often taken to task for generating and/or distributing content that runs afoul of some politician's sensibilities sooner or later. And, of course, you occasionally have companies that intentionally challenge the law to preserve the rights of all creators -- e.g. Random House's involvement in the lawsuits that established Ulysses as "not obscene" and thus protected under the First Amendment.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

But by all means, pretend that copyright law is the only way to go just because nobody is having major commercial success with an alternative yet.

Re-read my posts. I'm not saying by any means that "you have no choice." My argument is that if your goal is to achieve national or international success (which many, but not necessarily all, content creators do), you will need far more resources than almost any lone individual can amass.

More to the point, if you are a lone individual and you choose to release your work on a smaller scale, copyright law automatically protects your work. While I can see that you are focusing on the impact of copyright for the large companies, you are failing to recognize that copyright's automatic and flexible nature is a huge benefit for small-scale content creators -- or that the alternatives you suggest (open source, Creative Commons) use existing copyright law as the means by which these open licenses are protected in the first place.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I don't really understand why you think it a valid argument that the current revenue levels have to be maintained through idiotic legislation that, like trade tariffs, abridges the "market" to do its work at the cost of the tax payer (because they're the ones paying for the subsidies). Sure, people will earn less writing books, but then, so do horse buggy manufacturers.

Well, for starters, that's not my argument at all.

Part of what I am attempting to explain is that copyright protects everyone. Similarly, copyright is also highly flexible, and even the counter-examples you cite (e.g. OSS) rely upon it. I am supporting "current legislation" (copyright) because ultimately it protects the creator's rights.

Or, to put it another way: copyright basically establishes that the individual or group that creates a work essentially has ownership of that work, and can control how it is distributed. The alternative is that all works go directly into public domain the instant that it is in a fixed form -- i.e. the creator loses all ownership and control instantly, even before the work is completed. (Even copyright with short durations still qualifies as a form of copyright, btw.) I do not say that the latter option will "completely" destroy artworks -- besides the fact that it's histrionic, it's not true -- but I do not see any benefit to such a system, or any viable replacement to a total removal of copyrights, especially given the flexibility offered by current copyright laws. And if the problem is that "copyright durations are too long," then that's all you need to say -- rather than suggest the entire system needs to be junked, or mischaracterize it as only providing an advantage to large corporations.

Separately, I am definitely not insisting that we should freeze our economy into a structure circa 1995; far from it. I'm simply pointing out that a) content creators work with media companies of their own free will, and b) if you want to make something that requires collaboration and/or has a big national or international impact, it will be extremely difficult to do so without charging for it. And best of all, c) current copyright happens to be flexible enough to allow for an entirely new business model to develop and possibly even dominate.

If you don't like long copyright terms or DRM or companies that don't pay what they owe the artists, then your criticisms ought to target those specific issues. Ripping out copyright altogether will not relieve these problems; if anything, it will make them worse.