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Several comments argue that democracy makes all the difference. Why? Theoretically, the copyright law can be changed to limit it to 20 years. In practice, it
by three14 17y ago
Several comments argue that democracy makes all the difference. Why?
Theoretically, the copyright law can be changed to limit it to 20 years. In practice, it can't, despite the fact that more or less everyone who understands the issue and isn't either a lawyer or Disney employee agrees that it should be limited.
In some respects, the U.S. is a real democracy. On this particular issue, voters have no say, because they can't vote directly on the issue.
I support copyright, just not the version that Disney bought.
- ambition 17y agoThe majority of voters don't think that copyright reform is big enough issue to change a vote over. A minority of voters (you and I included) think copyright should be changed. But we're not big enough to make the change happen. You might think this is a bug worth fixing. "can't vote directly" implies that you think more direct democracy would solve the problem, but I claim the cure would be worse than the disease. There are major unsolved problems with allowing small highly interested groups to influence policy too much, since the system can't tell whether they're (we're) right or not. By contrast, even if censorship were a major issue on the minds of non-free citizens, they would be powerless to change it. Furthermore, censorship is an auto-immune disease: It harms the system's ability to fix itself and permits many more severe problems. Broken copyright isn't the same. (Corporate sponsorship of politicians, however, is an auto-immune disease too, and broken copyright is a symptom.)