Slashdot Mirror
The Case For Piracy
An anonymous reader writes "A mainstream media outlet has published an article called 'The Case for Piracy. The writer shows how copyright has been hijacked by corporations and that publishers are their own worst enemies. 'One of the main reasons we all have anti-piracy slogans embedded in our brains is because the music industry chose to try and protect its existing market and revenue streams at all costs and marginalise and vilify those who didn't want to conform to the harsh new rules being set.' There's a lot in the article that Slashdot readers can relate to, and it's interesting that so many replies seem to agree with the author."
The secondary problem with "strong copyright" is that copyright has become disconnected from the lifetime of the medium on which the performance/art/work is rendered.
Copyright is what now, 95 years for "work for hire" and life-of-author-plus-70 for independent? Compare that to the sales lifetime (or even TWICE the sales lifetime) of a standard video game console - a "decade lifetime" is pushing it. Atari 2600's and original NES units are considered antiques. Good luck even FINDING a working Vectrex.
Hell, even for non-gaming - a while back Slashdot had a story about a guy who built a homebrew Cray-1 replica. His biggest problem? FINDING SOFTWARE TO TEST IT WITH. Nobody kept the discs around, and the few discs that are even findable today have succumbed to bit-rot.
From that article:
After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Musuem and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90s. I filed a couple of FOIA requests with scary government agencies that also came up dry. I wound up e-mailing back and forth with a bunch of former Cray employees and also came up *mostly* dry. My current best hope is a guy I was able to track down that happened to own an 80 MB ‘disk pack’ from a Cray-1 Maintenance Control Unit (the Cray-1 was so complicated, it required a dedicated mini-computer just to boot it!), although it still remains to be seen if I’ll actually get a chance to try to recover it.
Under current "copyright", his asking for software copies is technically a violation of copyright.
"Copyright" has ceased to be what it originally was. The promise of copyright is that the protected creation is protected for a limited time, WHENCE IT SHALL ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND BE AVAILABLE. Increasingly, copyright has instead become a fucking scam to promote forced obsolescence and premature death-of-product and prevent even historians from preserving the work for posterity.