Pirate Party Leader: Copyright Laws Ridiculous

smitty777 writes "Rick Falkvinge, better known as the leader for Sweden's Pirate Party, recommends doing away with copyright laws since no one is following them anyway. FTA: '...he uses examples from the buttonmakers guild in 1600s France to justify eliminating the five major parts of copyright law today. The first two are cover duplication and public performance, and piracy today has ruined those. The next two cover rights of the creator to get credit and prevent other performances, satires, remixes, etc they don't like. Falkvinge says giving credit is important, but not worthy of a law. Finally, "neighboring rights" are used by the music industry to block duplication, which Falkvinge rejects.'"

Comments

Exponential Growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow any work to be copyrighted for 1 year without paying any fees. Let that be the "copyright from the moment your pen touches the paper".

Beyond Year 1, the cost of extending a copyright should be $0.01 * 2 ^ (Year #).

So, renewing the copyright for Year 2 costs $0.04.
Year 10 is $10.24

Copyright protection for a decade is affordable for anyone, and sometimes cheaper than coffee.

Year 20 is $10,485.76

Year 30 is $10,737,418.24

Year 40 is $10,995,116,277.76

So it provides everybody with a reasonable measure of copyright protection.
It provides corporate entities a way to keep copyrights on things that are very profitable.
It ensures that all works will eventually fall to the public domain.

Why not?

Ahem, FCC? Yeah, could you read this....

[TiggertheMad]

Commercial Regular Rotation for Rock, Alt, Urban (8 weeks) R&R indicator stage 1 (small markets - 10 stations) .$ 15000 R&R indicator stage 2 (medium & small markets - 25 stations) $ 30000 Regional (non-charting) (10-15 stations) $8000 BDS Promotion (7-10 stations) $15000

This looks like it was cut and paste from some sort of official spreadsheet or list. Wasn't there a massive antitrust lawsuit back in the 1970s where the government came down down hard on Pay for Play radio stations? The snippet I pasted above looks to my untrained eye like prices for playing singles. Could you expand on where you got this info, DCTech?

Re:Typical Politician

[AK Marc]

I violate copyright because I treat my property as mine. I lend it, perform it in "public" and do whatever I want with it, regardless of the law. The problem with copyright is that the law doesn't follow the goal anymore. It doesn't protect creators when few creators retain rights to their creations. Creators don't have a right to be reimbursed for their hard work. They are reimbursed for freely giving that hard work to the Public Domain. However, they are not living up to their end of the bargain. Effectively nothing has entered Public Domain since Mickey was created, and possibly never will. I don't disagree that copyright is a noble idea. Bribe creators to release creations (or publish specs of inventions). But the current system is worse than abolition.

But copyright abolition is a cure worse than the disease.

The movie industry would bitch and moan for 5-10 years, then get back to business as usual, with movies being played in theaters and on TV, even if DVDs never get released (and likely, DVDs would be released at a $5-$10 price point, rather than the $30 price point most new DVDs list at). Books would stay as is. The result of complete abolition of copyright would be an explosion in music and software the likes of which the planet has never seen. Copyright is holding innovation back more than helping at this point, and doing so by punishing the general public. With it gone, more music would be out there, with no decrease in quality, and app store sized games would be released by the millions. Consoles would probably move back to cartridges and flash-based propriatary storage to maintain a digitial lock on games, and PC games would crash, but the fallout of the abolition would be a huge jump forward in Public knowledge, which was the original point of copyright. The US would be much much better off without copyright. I've visited some places with no software protections, and they are vibrant economies of software creation. You can code whatever you want without worrying that someone else has locked up some feature you thought up. Most software patents are obvious and not novel, and elimination of that hurdle increases programming output.

I can't see any likely future in which we'd be better off with the course we've set vs complete abolition of all IP laws. It would take some getting used to, and some would purposefully sabotage themselves to prove a point, but overall, the world would be a much better place if all I laws (patents as well) were abolished, than to continue the system as done today.

Of course, there is a middle ground, closer to what existed when the Constitution was first ratified where the terms were much shorter and patents could only be of "things" rather than "thoughts" that is better than either extreme. But that was perverted to what we have now, so I'd opt for complete abolition than a middle ground which the content exploiters immediately strive to overthrow, as they have already done once.