On Mon, Dec 04, 2006 at 08:50:08PM -0800, Lan Barnes wrote: > If the architects of our Republic had thought copyright was pernicious, > they could easily have written that no copyright would exist in the United > States. They chose to institute it and give Congress the power to regulate > it. > > A man has to have pretty big cajones to say he knows better how things > should be run than the remarkable men who wrote the Constitution. And who > knows, you may be wiser, but nothing you've said on this thread has > revealed that superiority.
A man also has to be blind not to see that technology has changed things drastically since the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution. The Constitution says (paraphrasing) that the purpose of copyright was/is to promote public knowledge/learning. The question is whether with the Internet, copyright is still needed to pursue that goal of our Founding Fathers. In short, we want the same goals as the Founding Fathers, we just may have to change the means to achieve it. > So without copyright, who is to profit from the creative effort and > financial sacrifice of the creator? I have no problem with people who > release works into the public domain voluntarily or choose a copyright > like the GPL. That's their choice, and a damned fine one too. But if > someone lives on cat food in a freezing garret for years writing plays, > novels, or screen plays, and then hits it big, I think that person has a > perfect right to collect the just profits of his work, and that includes > Michael's brother and his investors. The freezing cat food eating artist sounds like a myth. A computer with OpenOffice on it is cheap. Times have changed. Also, I question whether many artists besides a few stars make any real $$ from copyright as I've said before. I think that might be a myth too. > Saying that copyright should be abolished because it's been abused > recently in our pay-for-play form of government strikes me as a childish > snit. It's not exactly the way some of us think it should be, so it has to > go altogether. Corrupted system is not the only reason that has been advanced in this thread. chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
