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The best example of the lack of copyright is the fashion industry. There is no copyright. Everything you can see on the street or in the store you can copy free and sell it. But are we lacking of fashion? Hell no, the fashion industry is the most creative industry and there are no shortcomings of profits either. Don't believe me: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Only 5% of all book authors and musicians are actually making money off of copyright. At least 95% of book authors are not selling over 5000 copies of their works, the music bands are just getting 1% of each CD sales. Just watch The Surprising History of Copyright and What It Means For... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI

Another example is Metallica. They made $22.8 million from shows and only $1.6 million from album sales. The price for the album is $22.99 (or something I made a quick search) that should be $6.8 million. Even a big band like Metallica makes only 24% profit of a CD sale. Image how much a no name band is making (from http://timothyblee.com/2010/03/02/album-sales-a-trivial-fraction-of-metallicas-revenue/). And of course I like this image http://wussuphater.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/picture-1.png

Sorry, but only the 5% of the most red and most famous artists and book authors are making money from copyright. Anybody else makes no money from it. Copyright was never intended to help or protect the creator. It was historically a law to help publishers and still remains the law to help publisher. Why do you think it's called "copy right", because it protects the right of the publisher to make a copy of your work and to profit from it. The creator have the right to make a copy of his work already, you don't need a law for it.

Another argument, Creative Commons started in 2001. After only 2 years there were already approximately 1 million licenses under a CC license. After 7 years there are estimated 130 million CC licensed works. Here is my graph of their history Here is my prediction of CC works to the year 2015, by then we will have 7.6 billions works under CC.

Crap, didn't quite close off the footnoted references:
(1): http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute
(2): http://timothyblee.com/?p=1360

The Heartland Institute uses libertarian concepts, but from its start has been a front for wealthy conservative industrialists(1). As TFA describes the HI's report, it's the kind of libertarianism that is only concerned with limiting the power of the state, and is mute over injustices perpetrated by parties other than the state(2).

Mr. Bee is correct to note that although Stallman, et al, are not libertarians, the F/OSS community is in substance a real-life expression of a libertarian ideal. Market competition is a destroyer of marketable value, down to the logical zero. Profit arises from something monopolized, be it an idea, a process, or a thing... like the only gas station for the next 100 miles. F/OSS theoretically zeros out the marketability of software, but unlocks other kinds of value for the consumer.

Getting back to the HI report, Mr. Moglen claims not to like network neutrality based on the language of F/OSS evangelists. The fact is, his paymasters in telecom - in a federal move to make telecom competitive - did compete for a time, until they decided they'd rather enjoy the monopolist's profit by merging, than continue to the nirvana of its creative destruction.

Grrrrrrr, I'm an apex predator and you are my lunch. I'm gonna eat you!

-- Timothy Blee, the submitter