A copyright black hole swallows our culture - FT.com - Opinion - http://www.ft.com/cms...
Sep 8, 2009
from
Paul Buchheit,
chaz2b,
Beau Fernald,
Adriano,
Hein Roehrig,
David Vasileff,
Daniel Dulitz,
Evan Parker,
Kazutaka Ogaki,
Stephen Mack,
Mark Toomey,
Bruce Lewis,
Shannon Jiménez,
Andy Dustman,
Anika,
Michael R. Bernstein,
Daniel J. Pritchett,
Anne Bouey,
Kelly Norton,
Clare Dibble,
Richard Chen,
Amit Patel,
Taehoon Kim,
dkb,
Kemal,
Pandu ● IT Optimizer,
linearthoughts,
and
Atif UNALDI
liked this
"Once upon a time, three things held true. Copyrights were relatively short. You had to renew them (most people did not.) You didn’t get one unless you asked. Now none of those hold true. Copyright can last for more than 100 years. The result is that the world’s libraries are full of books that are still under copyright, commercially unavailable and, in many cases, “orphan works” with no known copyright holder. Copyright has exhausted its function, yet the works remain trapped in the cultural black hole."
- Bret Taylor
A fine piece. Copyright represents the darker side of capitalism; this notion that individuals have perpetual ownership over their works is quixotic. In fact, there is a larger social contract involved between Artists and society. Artists benefit from access to all the works of the world and society benefits with progress and beauty. Oppressive copyright perverts this contract.
- dkb
In other countries it's even worse. Some countries have "artistic rights" where an artist can decide what you're allowed to do with a work after you've bought it; some countries don't even allow you to give up your copyright (you can only give out licenses), so figuring out who owns copyright on a composite work could be a nightmare.
- Gabe