Quote:
Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj
I'm probably angry at the use of the word 'stealing' by some people, because for me stealing is what authors who don't release into public domain do. It's making a collage of previously existing cluture memes and claiming it as yours, taking this toy it away from the samdbox, away from rest of society, disallowing other people to build on it. It's a bad thing to do.
There's also an argument that authors deserve to be paid for their hard work. Well, no. They have a choice - the don't have to create if they don't want to. But there's no guarantee their work and time they spend creating is worth money to anyone else. This needs to be regulated by free market, and artificial scarcity introduced by copyright laws isn't what's best for society at this moment, in my opinion. I believe that the world with no copyright, where people create because they can make money in the absence of copyright, or because they just want to create and share and don't wait for the money would be healthier for overwhelming majority of people, even if some people who create now would start doing something else instead.
|
While I agree that copyright laws are too restrictive, mostly because the time period before expiration is way too long (which is moot since they can be renewed) and because of archaic restrictions on making backup copies and doing media changes, eliminating copyright laws would pretty much guarantee very few writers would continue to write. It takes a lot of time to write a large novel (even a small one) and, if they couldn't get paid for their work, they would have less time to devote to writing because they would be spending their time on a "real job" to put food on the table, etc.