The point of copyright is to protect creators from having their work stolen.
If an indie artist creates a work, a larger company could copy that work and distribute it as their own, and since that larger company has deeper pockets than thy indie artist, they can flood the market before the original artist has a chance to profit from it. Or perhaps a larger org creates an expensive work (game, movie, etc), anyone could redistribute it without paying the original creator.
Without copyright, we’d get way more paywalls, invasive DRM, etc. We get a taste of that today, but it can get way worse.
So we definitely need copyright, it just needs to be a lot shorter (say, 10-20 years).
I mean, the point was definitely stated as protecting creators. We’ve seen some solid David Vs Goliath stories of artists taking people who steal their work down.
However, this isn’t the reality for the majority of copyright. A lot of it just ties up works to companies owned by speculative shareholders (think of the lord of the rings).
Limits to duration would definitely help this, and we’d be on the same page there. However, I do still wonder if it shouldn’t be shorter for certain things (e.g. medical treatments or manufacturing), with the option of a public domain buyout to cover (reasonable, non-inflated) research costs.
Both would be patents, no? Those are 20 years in the US, whereas copyright is 70 years after author’s death (or 95-120 years for “work for hire” works). Both should be reduced, but they protect very different things and need different considerations.
The point of copyright is to protect creators from having their work stolen.
If an indie artist creates a work, a larger company could copy that work and distribute it as their own, and since that larger company has deeper pockets than thy indie artist, they can flood the market before the original artist has a chance to profit from it. Or perhaps a larger org creates an expensive work (game, movie, etc), anyone could redistribute it without paying the original creator.
Without copyright, we’d get way more paywalls, invasive DRM, etc. We get a taste of that today, but it can get way worse.
So we definitely need copyright, it just needs to be a lot shorter (say, 10-20 years).
I mean, the point was definitely stated as protecting creators. We’ve seen some solid David Vs Goliath stories of artists taking people who steal their work down.
However, this isn’t the reality for the majority of copyright. A lot of it just ties up works to companies owned by speculative shareholders (think of the lord of the rings).
Limits to duration would definitely help this, and we’d be on the same page there. However, I do still wonder if it shouldn’t be shorter for certain things (e.g. medical treatments or manufacturing), with the option of a public domain buyout to cover (reasonable, non-inflated) research costs.
Both would be patents, no? Those are 20 years in the US, whereas copyright is 70 years after author’s death (or 95-120 years for “work for hire” works). Both should be reduced, but they protect very different things and need different considerations.