Quote:
Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj
It's not a problem then, because every work needs to have a physical media to be stored in, and the process of copying the work is hard. No one's protesting, or even laughing at this "property" idea. Copyright law is invented, as temporary monopoly of the creator to copy the work, granted by the state, and so temporary compromise is reached.
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That's something that I was thinking, although you've rounded out the idea nicely.
It occurs to me that when copying is difficult and expensive, then the only reason to do it is in order to profit from doing so. So, in the past, the main purpose of copyright laws were to prevent someone from mass producing and distributing copies of someone else's work for profit.
But now, copying and distribution are easy and essentially free, so their is no profit in copyright infringement. And there's way more of that activity taking place today, and nobody is making any money from it. Anyone who would have been willing to buy a bootleg copy of something for, say, half the price of the real thing in the past is now more likely to just download it from somewhere for free. So copyright infringement for profit is now gone.
And of course the same thing holds for authors distributing their original works. The same costs of copying and distributing meant that they had to turn to publishing companies, but that isn't true any more.
Which does make me think that maybe we need some kind of fundamental shift in the way we look at copyright. I just don't know what it should be.