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The Copyright Crusade a Lost Cause?

Posted by Zonk on from the got-lost-in-his-own-museum dept.

A. Smith writes "Ars Technica is exploring the relationship between property rights and copyright, arguing that copyright holders are making a mistake by stressing similarities between property rights and copyright. They compare P2P users to 18th-century squatters in North America: 'Like squatters of old, many ordinary users find copyright law bewildering and are frustrated by the arbitrary restrictions it imposes. Customers wanting to rip their DVD collections to their computers, download music they can play on any device, or incorporate copyrighted works into original creative works find that there is no straightforward, legal way to do these things.' They conclude by offering that more reasonable, understandable copyright restrictions would result in a user base friendlier to publisher interests."

2 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Inconsistent Logic by TheMeuge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Would that mean that unless my business is profitable, I don't have to pay property taxes on the warehouse, factory, or store?

    Does that also mean that if I own an unoccupied residence I don't have to pay property taxes on that?

  2. Re:You guys can tryy and twist the issue but... by FredMenace · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It doesn't change the fact that you don't own the content. If you bought a book, you own the paper. If you bought a cd, you own the plastic. You don't have a right to distribute that content to 100s of thousands of people. The efforlessness of reproduction does not nullify the ownership of content.
    However, the entire justification for copyright (and patent) in the first place was to benefit SOCIETY by making creative ideas MORE WIDELY AVAILABLE. It was considered at the time that an evil such as limited (in both duration and scope) monopoly on distribution would be a necessary incentive to encourage such publication (so that others could then benefit). That presumes that not only is paper expensive, but so are printing presses, etc. - expensive enough that some financial return would be required to pay for the cost of those supplies.

    Fast-forward to today, where nearly any media can be created with low-cost (or free) tools and also distributed freely, and the argument about needing to recoup costs to distribute no longer has any meaning.

    The point here is that copyright was not meant to reward having a good idea; it was meant to reward DISTRIBUTING that idea. (Similarly, patents are meant to reward PUBLICATION of ideas for others to learn from; that is, to facilitate new ideas building on old ones by making the details of the old ones explicitly public.)