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Jumping In On The Lessig / Adkinson Copyright Debate
An Anonymous Coward writes: "LawMeme has an excellent response to William F. Adkinson's critique of Larry Lessig's ideas on copyright reform. What I found most interesting about the article though, was the link to this paper by Ernest Miller (of Yale's Information Society Project) and Joan Feigenbaum (editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cryptography) that says we should take the copy out of copyright."
is that the current trend is to increase copyright terms into incredibly ridiculous territories (which I define as being longer than the human lifespan) instead of decreasing the terms, which one would think would be the natural response given the advances we've made in distribution technologies such as automated printing presses, aircraft, and the Internet. The time it takes to fairly achieve a return on creating a work has been going down dramatically, given how quickly it can be duplicated and transported to where it can be sold -- it's no longer a bunch of monks transcribing a book by hand for months, or even a hand-cranked printing press -- yet we're expected to believe that we need to ramp the restrictions up precisely because of the advances in distribution technology? I don't need someone to refute a guy that argues that taking 25 years off of the current copyright limit will unfairly hurt the industry because it's obvious he's full of it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
People like Adkinson keep repeating this claim ad nauseam without any facts to back it up.
As far as I can tell, the tightening and extension of copyright law over the 20th century is correlated with a deterioration in quality art. Many of the greatest works of history were created without the benefits of copyright protection. Many great works of art would, in fact, violate copyright if today's copyright laws had been in effect at the time because they are the highly evolved end product of a long line of copies, with incremental improvements at each step. Much of creativity involves craftsmanship, and craftsmanship requires copying and recreation before creativity can be achieved.
So, some facts, please. If the government grants 100+ year monopolies to people and corporations, I'd like to see some evidence that this is beneficial to the rest of us. Because, Adkinson's ideological mumblings to the contrary, copyrights are not "property rights"--they are limited rights granted by the government only because they are beneficial to society.
The linked Miller article is very interesting and insightful - but I wonder, based on its discussion of public and private distribution, how libraries would work with this new definition of copyright. A library by default provides public distribution of a work - would this then be made illegal should copyright reflect distribution rather than reproduction?
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
William F. Adkinson, Jr. is Senior Policy Counsel at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a group that describes itself as a market-oriented think tank that promotes innovative policy solutions for the digital age.
The key phrase is "market-oriented." They are a group sponsored by big business. Their sponsors include:
* AOL Time Warner
* BMG
* National Cable & Telecommunications Association
* Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
* Vivendi Universal
And the article was published in The American Spectator, a shamelessly right-wing rag that caters to the crowd that believes that helping big business get bigger is the most important contribution that legislation can make to our lives.
Of course Adkinson came out with a pro-copyright rebuttal. His article is as unbiased and trustworthy as one citing the health benefits of cigarette smoking sponsored by R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris.