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Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 1
by snapplebobapple 3y ago
Its actually an argument for less regulation. Its the regulation causing the market failure. Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries. We are asking the fundamentally wrong question with copyright, we should not be maximizing monopoly for copyright owners, we should be minimizing market disruption to get a chosen amount of extra creative production
- ses1984 3y ago>Cut copyright to a less stupid number like what it was originally 14 years. Make maintaining a copyright for those years contingent on having X % of sales available for free in libraries I’m nitpicking but this isn’t less regulation, it’s different regulation. Some would even say it’s more. You’re reducing a number but adding complexity with the percent sales requirement.
- patcon 3y agoSome regulation liberates closures, and some protects closures. I believe the person is advocating for less regulation that protects private closures, and is throwing in the idea of more regulation to liberate closures... perhaps as a way to repair the damage caused by the closure. Maybe I'm assuming too much tho...! I appreciate your comment regardless :)
- ryandrake 3y agoPlus, if you got rid of or reduced copyright, publishers would just find other ways to engage in cartel-like behavior and continue to screw everyone. I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company.
- Retric 3y agoAirlines are often brought up as becoming cheaper with less regulations. While it was mostly manufacturers building more efficient aircraft, people are generally willing to trade leg room for a cheaper fair. That’s exactly the kind of thing regulators and the free market may come to a different compromise. Worse, but cheaper is often quite appealing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- giraffe_lady 3y agoAnything else you've noticed the free market compromising on re: air travel.
- ghaff 3y agoQuality generally with many manufactured goods. There are health and safety regulations but if there were a requirement for a 20-year warranty (which is about what my Aeron chair has) both quality and prices would probably increase significantly. In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to generally buy a car without modern safety features. (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or lower safety ratings within the regulatory framework.) A common thread is that when push comes to shove, a lot of consumers will choose the lower price.
- harvey9 3y agoThe straight-to-landfill consumer goods make me sad, but I guess I can buy cheaper tires and only drive in ideal conditions so there can be a place for middling quality.
- ghaff 3y agoOr tools for the occasional household use. You might not want junk but that table saw you use maybe a handful of times a year may not have to be as high-end as what a carpenter might use most days.
- thayne 3y agoWhich would be fine if you could tell if you could actually reliably find high quality products. But I'm increasingly finding it difficult to distinguish between paying more for quality and paying more for overpriced junk.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoHow they respond depends on whether the regulation causes or mitigates market power. for example,Something like deregulating the last mile for internet is probably not going to end well because the incumbents control that and that is the mote that is expensive enough to recreate that it causes monopoly. Copyright causes monopoly because it stops marginal price being able to equal marginal cost by allowing only one person the right to provide the copyrighted thing. get rid of it and price goes to zero pretty fast because cost of electronic diatribution is near zero
- miki123211 3y ago> that is the mote that is expensive enough to recreate A somewhat large part of why it is so expensive to recreate is all the regulations and burreaucracy involved in laying cables along public roads. Make that significantly easier and cheaper, and you suddenly need those last-mile regulations a lot less. Network effects are where you actually need regulation.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoI am skeptical that removing rwgularion would solve all of the last mile issue because there is a moaaic of different starting posotions and what that looks like determines the deregulated cost of dupkicating service (eg does a govt owned utility own the poles and will allow cheap usage or does the incumbent fpr profit own it and will blocl usage as justone starting condition of many).
- WalterBright 3y ago> I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company. When the government deregulated air travel prices, routes, and schedules.
- ghaff 3y agoAnd if we're talking textbooks, I'm not sure what cutting copyright to 14 years actually accomplishes. I'm also not sure how you dole out X% of sales to libraries that might be interested. Especially given libraries are often ill-defined.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoI don't think anyone would really complain if such an act assumed "libraries" == "public libraries", a very well defined term that's already enshrined in federal legislation.
- shiandow 3y agoFine, abolish copyright then, let's see what happens.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 3y agoWe know what will happen. Germany had no copyright protections in the 19th century. The country's economy boomed, making Germany the industrial powerhouse of Europe.
- c0pium 3y agoCan you expand on this point? Having no copyright being a leading cause of industrial expansion seems pretty tenuous. Especially given that they now have copyright and other countries also had booming economies at about the same time.
- WalterBright 3y agoThe printers went looking for things to print, and they printed anything and everything. The easiest way to get material to print, besides copying other printers' output, was to commission how-to manuals. Germany was flooded with how-to informational manuals on every topic. Much like the software industry. Free software runs the world.
- snapplebobapple 3y agoIt is less regulation in that it gets the governmemt out of interfering with the market outcome (marginal price of dostribution is effectively zero so market outcome without copyright is zero price electeonic diatribution). The percentage sales requirement is just an easy way to force intelligent behavior by copyright holders for public libraries to lessen the market failure for the poors caused by copyright. I am open to simpler ideas as long as the outcome is copyright fuckery does not result in no provision of knowledge for the poors and only extractive pricing for a short time period that incentizes additional content creation for the rest of us.
- surge 3y agoIt's literally less in that the time the copyright is enforced (aka regulated) is less.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoWhat you really want here is for ebooks to be subject to First Sale. In general "licensing" should be restricted to the rights of the copyright holder, e.g. giving someone a license to permanently increase the number of copies that exist in the world, as when an author licenses a publisher. If someone has bought a copy, that should be theirs, they should be free to transfer it to other devices and other people as long as there continues to be only as many permanent copies as they've purchased, and the copyright holder can't impose any further restrictions on that, essentially as an anti-trust anti-tying rule because copyright is a monopoly. Then libraries could buy physical or digital copies and do the thing they've always done.
- jzb 3y agoIt doesn’t really make sense to transfer the concept of first sale to digital goods. Even assuming a scheme that allows a library to fully control lending so that only one copy is in use at a time, a digital copy is not going to wear out. So publishers lose out on sales of popular titles when a library would need to refresh a physical copy.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIt takes longer for a physical copy to wear out than copyright terms should last to begin with. Also, you're allowed to repair books -- because it's your book.
- c0pium 3y agoI own multiple books that are over 100 years old. They weren’t even that expensive.
- j_maffe 3y agoIf you're going to nitpick on this, fine... some research can be done on the number of uses a book can go through before it wears out and apply that to the e-book. It's certainly more than 26 and absolutely more than 2 years (how this 2 years condition is acceptable I'll never know)
- knome 3y ago
- 8note 3y agoIn a zero regulation world, you consider either that there's no copyrights, or that copyrights have infinite length