Pew Study: File Traders Don't Care About Copyright

An anonymous reader writes "A recent poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project focused on that portion of the file trading community that is over 18. The major finding is that two-thirds of all file traders in this age bracket are not concerned about violating copyright laws. This remained consistant even when they split up the respondents by sex, income, and race."

Comments

Re:old news

[Mod Me God]

Yeah, there is a link here too (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/31 15829.stm).

The RIAA have dismissed this, as the time the survey was taken was before their recent legal action. Note that doesn't mean the action will work, just this survey is irrelevant for the here-and-now.

Re:Sweet

[chrisbw]

Seriously though, we live in a democracy

Err, actually, we live in a republic:

1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit (the French Fourth Republic)
2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity (the republic of letters)
3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia

(I hope I didn't violate Merriam-Webster's copyright there...)

Re:No kidding, really?

[uncoveror]

14 year copyright was renewable once if authors and artists still were alive, and still had something commercially viable, but they had to apply for renewal, it was not automatic. That original law was perfectly adequate to encourage authors and artists to keep creating. It was always done for the benefit of society as a whole. That is what the US Constitution means when it says, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".

This did not create "intellectual property", a highly offensive misnomer, it created a temporary loan from the public domain, to which all ideas belong once expressed. There is similar language in the laws of many other countries.

Since copyright has ceased to serve its purpose, it is time either to return it to 14 years, renewable once, or to abolish it entirely.