Lars Aronsson wrote:
daniwo59(a)aol.com wrote:
I would hope the reason we oppose the extension
of copyright is
far more principled than that.
I agree. I think what we have to make clear is that there is a
public interest on the far side of copyright expiration. Most new
legislation is written by asking for input from all interested
parties, involving both sides in any conflict. But for copyright
law this has traditionally meant both publishers and authors, or
both record companies and artists. Both sides have agreed that
more protection and longer expiration times is better. For
example when life+50 was changed to life+70, this was only
described as an improvement. The people who disagree, that is we,
the users of public domain material, have not been asked.
This is an important point. Until very recently in the history of
copyrights that third interest group did not pose a realistic threat to
the industry. The cost of producing large quantities of free material
from protected works was prohibitive. That all began to change when
home photocopying became possible, and accelerated with the computer and
high speed internet. If material can now be be downloaded from the
internet, and it is entirely at the option of the end-user to produce a
dead tree version at his own cost, there is very little rationale for
maintaining the distribution network that separates the artist from the
consumer.
As long as consumers could not realistically employ rights there was no
incentive to establish those rights in law. I believe that patents have
a much shorter and more reasonable life span because using the ideas in
an infringement was more realistically possible for a broader segment of
the population.
Of course, both shopowners and shoplifters are not
involved in
drafting anti-theft legislation. So what we have to make clear is
that we represent a public interest that is not only huge, but
also legitimate.
If I remember correctly, it was Jefferson that noted that the taking of
intellectual property rights could not be theft because the after the
"theft" the owner still had everything that he had before the event.
In countries (such as Scotland and Scandinavia) where
you have
[[freedom to roam]], this is certainly against the interest of
land owners, but on the other side of the negotiation table are
hiking societies, such as [[sv:Svenska Turistföreningen]] with
300,000 members or 3 percent of the total population of Sweden.
This is in stark
contrast with countries where shooting a trespasser is
seen as a normal way of protecting one's property.
Ec