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UK Citizens May Soon Need License To Photograph Stuff They Already Own (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with this story from Ars Technica UK: Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects, even if you own them. That's the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25 years after they were first marketed to 70 years after the creator's death. In most cases, that will be well over a hundred years after the object was designed. During that period, taking a photo of the item will often require a licence from the copyright owner regardless of who owns the particular object in question. This sounds like a great kernel for a short story, and a terrible idea for a law.
...but without any of the freedom that came with lack of surveillance technology. Conservative policy since Thatcher has been solidly about contracting out as much of the apparatus of State, including the laws themselves, for the benefit of business-friends.
The best thing to do is laugh at the 1/6 or so of the population stupid enough to have voted in this government, and encourage the rest of the population to vote them out again.
Yes, that is the goal. The problem is that physically making stuff is quickly becoming a very low barrier for competition. 20-30 years ago, if you wanted to, say, make furniture, you would need an enormous amount of capital expenditure, a big factory, lots of workers. Now you can buy the machinery (or just outsource it to china) for probably 10% of that cost. It means it is very hard for a big incumbent to maintain large profit margins because a small up-start can jump in and start competing.
Big corporates hate this. The whole idea of being a big corporate is that you can stomp around being wildly inefficient but have so much money you can either crush or buyout anyone who might threaten your position. Reducing competitive barriers to entry scares these people a lot because it may very well expose their incompetence.
So the natural avenue of attack has been to compensate for the loss of scarcity on the physical side with made-up scarcity through this whole notion of 'intellectual property'. First they will get people to accept that someone who admittedly came up with a nice original design, should have this crazy (70 years after their death) monopoly on that design. Then they will expand it to cover things that you would not consider very original at all. Then they will get really sloppy with even checking if there is any originality. Before you know it you will have to have millions of dollars to go to court and invalidate a government-enforced-monopoly if you want to make anything that looks like it could be a chair, which you won't be able to do if you are a small up-start, and so mega-corp goes back to not working very hard and flying around on junkets in corporate jets.
This is the way the world works. What will kill it is the march of technology, and globalisation. The Chinese still don't really care about copyright, and when Westerners realise that they are living in relative poverty because of all these government enforced monopolies that keep a bunch of incompetent lawyers rich, they will get really annoyed. Sadly we are probably a decade or so from that.