Quote:
Originally Posted by bingle
But my point is that copyright laws are ineffective. They don't prevent people copying information any more. They only really worked when copying things was difficult and expensive.
|
They never really did
prevent it, only allowed for redress when someone did so.
If I'm (finally) understanding what you're getting at, you're saying that copyright laws (mostly) worked when copying required a lot of infrastructure to do on any sort of scale, because only a few fairly large players could do it in enough quantity to make an impact, and those few were relatively easily tracked down if they got out of line.
But
now, copying is so simple, cheap and easy, and distribution the same plus largely anonymous, which makes
enforcement next to impossible because there are a multitude of small, more or less invisible "operations" which can have a great impact, individually and collectively.
So it's not so much that the copyright laws have stopped
working as it is that the paradigm has shifted in such a way that what
was enforcible, no longer
is enforcible.
Am I following/extrapolating more or less correctly what you mean, bingle?
If that
is what you're saying ... then I have to agree you have an
excellent point (which we all seem to have been missing rather badly). I also don't see any flaws in that reasoning.
If we consider a situation where IP laws are not enforced simply because it is no longer physically
possible to do so, that could be a ...
significant market force toward changing the way we do things.
The two responding approaches I see are try to create some new way to enforce the laws which
is possible (though DRM is already failing rather badly), or try to find a totally new approach to realizing gain for the IP generators' efforts. Which of course brings us back full circle.
