All copyright proponents start with “We all agree, that we need to protect intelectual property” and then proceed to explain how they need to create draconian laws and draconian protection technology. It goes without saying that they both suck.
But at that place, they already lost me. I don’t really believe in a thing called intellectual property. For me this is about as useless as the notion of owning land was to the native americans. But really, think about it. It basically says that your thoughts are some kind of sellable product. That’s absurd. Lawyers have came up with a term “immaterial goods” which is an contradiction in itself.
We need to stop trying to fit our physical terms in a world where they don’t belong. And we really should consider the damage copyright has done. In fact, it is crazy to complain about the split between the rich and the poor and then create stricter copyright laws, that protect the mainly the rich copyright managers.
Recently, I read a pro-copyright pamphlet signed by some german book authors, complaining about piracy, no actually about stealing, which would be funny if it wasn’t so sad how misguided it is. Piracy is not theft and with that article they made sure that I won’t ever buy anything which bears their name. I don’t want to support people who view things differently but also lie to the public and try to influence public opinion, maybe by malice but most likely by ignorance. Not to mention that book piracy is not nearly as common as for example music, because the most popular e-Book platform is the kindle and Amazon makes it much easier to buy books than to pirate them.
This is interesting, because I also create copyrightable works, I write software. You can find most of it on my GitHub account. And if I had a couple of wishes, I as a programmer would wish for less copyright, not more. Also, getting rid of patents, but that’s stuff for another post. The last thing that I would want is for my copyright protection to be stronger. Currently, my copyrights expire some 70 years after my death, and given an estimate that I will evade being flattened by a bus for the next 30 years, you can freely incorporate my previously AGPLv3+ licensed code in your proprietary applications in 2112. See, this is ridiculus.
The aforementioned book authors were fearing for their jobs and proclaiming that we can’t keep up our culture level without professional culture creators. That’s maybe the most ridiculous claim. They ask to help them survive. I don’t see a reason for this, it is like supporting a ice-transport industry because it might get replaced by refrigerators so people don’t need ice. And like ice transports we don’t need copyright. Sorry, that’s life. If you can’t survive as author, don’t become author than. I like cycling, but I can’t get people to pay me doing this. I don’t write newspaper articles how unfair this is, it is market at work.
Besides this, the notion of paid professionals necessary for creating culture goods is totally wrong. The most prominent example is the Free/Open Source Comunity. While there are many people paid for developing on the Linux kernel, on the other projects there’s many people working on lots and lots of smaller low-profile things in their free time. You might say, ok, but that’s software, it does not apply to other things. I beg to differ. See the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV which was released under a liberal license. Actually, from the statistics I saw, most musicians earn their money from their concerts and not from the actual sold “product”. Also see the works of paniq which are at least as good as many mass-media commercial releases. If you look at DeviantArt you can find lots of beautiful art from hobby artists. And crowd-founding sites like Kickstarter show new ways on how to create great things and still get paid.
But let’s look at it from the other side, let’s see what copyright destroys. Take a look how many videos are blocked on YouTube because they use some copyrighted music (it get’s even funnier, I saw talks that were blocked because the presenter used copyrighted music), take a look at all that crappy DVD encryption bullshit, take a look how much effort DRM is. It is basically impossible to buy legitimate media on Linux because of all that software that is needed for the DRM is not ported to Linux and because it is DRM, it cannot really be implemented freely. Se how the copyrigh spawned an entire industry of lawyers to sue people and other companies.
What if there was a world where copyright didn’t exist… oh wait, there is. See how the industrial Japan came to existance. That’s old history, so take a better example of China. Guess which country’s industry is growing like crazy. Have you seen the chinese copies of Twitter? Nobody gives a damn about what copyrights Twitter might have of that. Is there something wrong with that? I my opinion, not at all, they are free to do that and the world is none the worse because of that. Actually, on the contrary, the copied Twitter style is nice enough and it saved the chinese internet users from having to deal with an ugly, blinky 90ies style site. I can see chinese companies suing western companies for copyright infringement in some years.
We need to stop this madness. We need to get rid of copyright. Chances of that actually happening: 0.