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comment by NotPhil
NotPhil  ·  4568 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Anthony Accardo: Is Copyright Enforcement Censorship?
Publishers keep saying that they're only looking out for the interests of authors, composers, directors, and performers whenever they push for copyright extensions and more draconian copyright enforcement. But, for some reason, they never talk about how little they pay the overwhelming majority of writers and performers when they take the rights to publish their work from them, nor do they mention how much previously published work is currently unpublished because they see no profit in maintaining publication, but won't give publication rights back to the authors or performers because that would represent a loss of assets.

And, while the author is complaining about semantics, I should point out that the practice he's referring to is called bootlegging, not piracy, and, despite what he says, censorship has nothing to do with whether or not a government body is suppressing speech, it only refers to the suppression of speech.





mk  ·  4567 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Agreed. When it comes to copyright, I am arriving at the opinion that copyright should be lost after 20 years. No exceptions.

If the time is limited, copyright represents a limited opportunity, not a long-term cash cow. A work will then be more of an event than oil well, and as a result, creators might get offered a bigger slice of the pie for the opportunity they created.

Also, (and I feel this way about patents too) each time that copyright ownership is transferred, I think the remaining time for the copyright should be cut in half. This puts the creator in the driving seat, and diminishes the ability to treat copyrights as currency.

NotPhil  ·  4565 days ago  ·  link  ·  
You might be interested in seeing what America's founding fathers had in mind when they created copyright law in the U.S.:

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-founding-fathers-had-co...

14 years, plus an additional 14 years, if the author, and only the author, wanted to renew it.

mk  ·  4565 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Thanks, I had no idea. That sounds like such a reasonable approach to take.
bunnydragon  ·  4567 days ago  ·  link  ·  
The author claims "those who profit from piracy want to include unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content in the category of speech" and yet the letter linked to in the article only seems to suggest that a website constitutes a form of speech not the bootlegged content that may make up some part of its content. I think the article makes too many generalizations but brings up good points that neither side may be representing the issues at hand fairly as they both have financial interests in the outcome.