Copyright Week: If We Want To Get Copyright Right, It's Time To Go Back To Basics

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple... others ... others... in Europe... in China... others...

Nah, it's all about bucks. When it suits one party, copyright is great. When it works against one party, copyright should be reviewed. They should just say : "We want the bucks, we want control and nothing else !". Fed up ! If I were to do anything of value, I won't do anything.

Sorry to write this way, really fed up !

The problem at this point is that the vested interests are SO vested, that they will fight any change that isn't in the same direction that change has always been, toward more power for them.

Recording contracts still have deductions for _breakage_, as if music is still shipped on lacquer disks!

Publishers are taking it from both sides. Customers of all kinds of media are bypassing the "normal" channels more and more, while authors and artists are going direct-to-customer, and so cutting out the Vested Interests completely.

What the big publishers just don't seem to understand, for example the MPAA, is that people go to a theater because they _want_ to go to a theater! Their movies make lots of money from ticket sales, and nothing they can do is going to force someone who would rather watch a downloaded copy than spend $15 (after popcorn) in a theater, to do so.

One original purpose of Copyright (in the US) was to ensure that works would enter the Public Domain in such a way that they would not be lost. That's why a copy of the work had to be filed with the Library of Congress in order to qualify for Copyright protection, and then only for a few years.

The Vested Interests have made a mockery of everything that Copyright (in the US) was supposed to be, by both making Copyright automatic (nothing sent to the Library of Congress) _and_ perpetual.

If the choice is between what Copyright is _now_ and abolition, then abolish it.

There are quite a number of movies and a significant amount of books that have not been authorized for reprinting which have disintegrated and are now lost forever or will disintegrate soon. Publishers tend not to be concerned about this because the fewer old books and movies available, the less competition there is for new stuff.

I imagine that not wanting competing material available is one thing publishers don't like about digital copies. It also makes DRM more attractive in theory because when they want to retire a whole generation of previous material they can just switch DRM schemes and eventually people can't easily access the old material. This seems silly to me, but we're talking about the same industry that used to purposely destroy copies of movies a few years old so that they wouldn't be readily available to compete with current material. It seems mostly bad PR and alienation of authors, actors, and directors that made them stop (it's amusing to see the disconnect between the people who feel they are producing art and the executives of the MPAA).