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There's a strong argument that copyright is no longer a net good. Copyright's value proposition is providing a monetization framework by allowing people to pre

There's a strong argument that copyright is no longer a net good. Copyright's value proposition is providing a monetization framework by allowing people to prevent others from sharing. Its only function is to limit creating copies. This made sense in the days of the printing press. Nowadays we have many other monetization models which aren't predicated on limiting sharing. Many large and in some case (open source) leading systems are built on these non-restrictive models. I think the negative aspects of copyright - the chilling effect on the free exchange of information - is non-linear. The more information we have, the more collective cost is paid by society having to worry about the chilling aspects (is my youtube video legal? Is my software? etc). If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure. I think we probably hit this point in the 1990s, unfortunately. We are long overdue to repeal copyright entirely.

0xcde4c3db 4y ago
> If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure. I think it's worth considering not just the number of works, but also the number of copiers. In the days when copying meant printing presses, the physical act of making copies was overwhelmingly a commercial activity performed by a relative handful of businesses. Making a copy of a substantial work was not something the average person had a serious opportunity to do even once in their entire life, so copyright law only meaningfully restricted a small number of entities. By the mid-1980s, with the proliferation of human-scale media technologies like the photocopier, VCR, camcorder, tape deck, and floppy drive, the number of meaningfully regulated entities began an explosive growth that has not stopped since. Copyright law has been amended with hacks like the AHRA and DMCA, but has never come close to a true reckoning with the modern reality of a copy being just a click away for countless millions of people, never mind cultural phenomena like meme generators, mashups, and fanfic that tend to functionally treat authorship less as a matter of negotiable consideration and more as a matter of tribal history.

0xcde4c3db 4y ago

> If the benefit of copyright is linear and the cost is non-linear as the number of works in the world grows then at some point we should abolish copyright entirely as the collective costs would be greater than the benefit provided by its incentive structure. I think it's worth considering not just the number of works, but also the number of copiers. In the days when copying meant printing presses, the physical act of making copies was overwhelmingly a commercial activity performed by a relative handful of businesses. Making a copy of a substantial work was not something the average person had a serious opportunity to do even once in their entire life, so copyright law only meaningfully restricted a small number of entities. By the mid-1980s, with the proliferation of human-scale media technologies like the photocopier, VCR, camcorder, tape deck, and floppy drive, the number of meaningfully regulated entities began an explosive growth that has not stopped since. Copyright law has been amended with hacks like the AHRA and DMCA, but has never come close to a true reckoning with the modern reality of a copy being just a click away for countless millions of people, never mind cultural phenomena like meme generators, mashups, and fanfic that tend to functionally treat authorship less as a matter of negotiable consideration and more as a matter of tribal history.