Wednesday, November 18, 2015
More Evidence Of How Copyright Makes Culture Disappear In A Giant Black Hole
Techdirt: That giant gaping hole on the right side of the graph should be pretty distressing. It counters the totally false narrative by certain legacy copyright system supporters that copyright is necessary to get books published and also that without copyright, no one would bother to sell the works, because they could just be copied by others. But, more importantly, it shows how much important culture is totally locked up because of copyright law -- unable to be published by those who'd like to offer them, and not worth it for the copyright holders to actually publish.
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2 comments:
I do not think preserving culture is a good argument for copyright, not because of the data that clearly disproves the sentiment, but because that not why we do it.
In a naive sense, we copyright to protect authors, artists, etc... so that they benefit from the fruits of their labor. The goal is to guarantee creators that they can continue to create and be paid for it. If the chance of making any money goes away than how can we expect anyone to pursue artistic professions. Plus the period the article is referring to is before the digital age. It is kind of hard to delete something entirely when I could make a 100,000,000 copies with the click of a button. This argument is out dated.
In a realistic sense we copyright to protect poor little Disney from what the internet would do to Mickey Mouse if it was copyrighted.
The black hole culture theory with copyright is an issue that needs to be taken more seriously. I have started to view copyright less as a system to protect individual ideas and instead helping to protect big business and keeping the pieces of their iconic brand for longer than necessary. With the exception of films we are a culture that isn’t exposed to the same way of thinking and thoughts people over thirty years ago were interacting with every day. Like the article state copyrighted material becomes completely ineffective for many things after 28 years. And we are only hurting ourselves as a culture by keeping ourselves boxed in and not being able to explore all the idea and concepts of the people that came before us. What needs to be understood is the fact that by this time of which humans have been on the planet no idea come up with today is going to be an original idea, the odds are just too in the land of impossible. What is really sad is that fact that the push to keep the copyright laws going longer is coming from big business who don’t want to have to go through the hassle as mush to frequently renew the copyright.
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