4 ms·

In other words, it has taken the ridiculous cultural productivity of the internet era to even balance out the downward drag of copyright. Copyright and patents

In other words, it has taken the ridiculous cultural productivity of the internet era to even balance out the downward drag of copyright. Copyright and patents need to be completely destroyed. They are not worth the price.

yuhong 15y ago
Copyright terms that are too long are not worth the price. Copyright renewal would be much better.
- JulianMorrison 15y ago
  Do you think that graph would look any better with a mere 50 years of suppression? Or even a minuscule 20?
- slowpoke 15y ago
  There is no period of time that is short enough. Even a year, three months or a week is too long. Copyright can't keep up with the speed of our culture anymore. The same goes for patents and progress, essentially. It's time to get rid of this artifact of the 20th century (along with the eternally backwards industries around it), it's holding us back.
  - JulianMorrison 15y ago
    The shortest time worth considering is a full publishing cycle - from pitch to advance to raw product to publication to break-even to profit. Given all the queues in each of the pre-publication phases and the slowness of making back the cost of preparing a work, I doubt you could squeeze that under 20 years. Otherwise it's just a cruel tease.
    - slowpoke 15y ago
      If this way of publication can't keep up with reality anymore, then I'm afraid it's not a viable business model, and should be scrapped, not kept on life-support with increasingly ridiculous monopoly laws which ultimately harm humanity as a whole.
andreasvc 15y ago
Without copyright, there would be no legal basis for a Free Software license such as the GPL. I think having some kind of copyright is rather important, as long as it isn't unfairly biased towards corporations etc.
- pessimizer 15y ago
  Without copyright, there would be no need for the GPL.
  - JulianMorrison 15y ago
    GPL can do one thing that "without copyright" can't: protect derived works from becoming "trade secret" (unprotected, but published as binary only). Still not worth it.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  It takes far less copyright than we currently have to make the GNU GPL effective. In fact, when the GPL was first proposed in the mid 1980s, copyright was much less draconian than it is now. The irony is that the GPL's ju jitsu turns copyright's strength on itself -- the stronger the protections of copyright, the stronger the terms of the GPL. And so long as copyright is about allowing authors and publishers to set terms for the distributions of their works, this will be the case. The GPL is just a case of a particularly philanthropically minded author/publisher.

yuhong 15y ago

JulianMorrison 15y ago
Do you think that graph would look any better with a mere 50 years of suppression? Or even a minuscule 20?
slowpoke 15y ago
There is no period of time that is short enough. Even a year, three months or a week is too long. Copyright can't keep up with the speed of our culture anymore. The same goes for patents and progress, essentially. It's time to get rid of this artifact of the 20th century (along with the eternally backwards industries around it), it's holding us back.
- JulianMorrison 15y ago
  The shortest time worth considering is a full publishing cycle - from pitch to advance to raw product to publication to break-even to profit. Given all the queues in each of the pre-publication phases and the slowness of making back the cost of preparing a work, I doubt you could squeeze that under 20 years. Otherwise it's just a cruel tease.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    If this way of publication can't keep up with reality anymore, then I'm afraid it's not a viable business model, and should be scrapped, not kept on life-support with increasingly ridiculous monopoly laws which ultimately harm humanity as a whole.

andreasvc 15y ago

Without copyright, there would be no legal basis for a Free Software license such as the GPL. I think having some kind of copyright is rather important, as long as it isn't unfairly biased towards corporations etc.

pessimizer 15y ago
Without copyright, there would be no need for the GPL.
- JulianMorrison 15y ago
  GPL can do one thing that "without copyright" can't: protect derived works from becoming "trade secret" (unprotected, but published as binary only). Still not worth it.
dredmorbius 15y ago
It takes far less copyright than we currently have to make the GNU GPL effective. In fact, when the GPL was first proposed in the mid 1980s, copyright was much less draconian than it is now. The irony is that the GPL's ju jitsu turns copyright's strength on itself -- the stronger the protections of copyright, the stronger the terms of the GPL. And so long as copyright is about allowing authors and publishers to set terms for the distributions of their works, this will be the case. The GPL is just a case of a particularly philanthropically minded author/publisher.