I think it's for 3 reasons:
1) most people get their information from media sources that profit from copyrights.
2) academics profit from copyrights.
Therefore little research is done to showing how copyrights and patents are bad for equality and the economy, and the work that is done receives little to no attention in the media (which doesn't want to go hunting for new business models to replace their current profits)
3) The industry has done a great job at marketing copyrights and patents as intellectual "property rights", even though it is in fact the exact opposite of property rights (property rights and copyrights/patents are logically incompatible). You have to hand it to them, dishonest but effective.
How do you solve this?
1. You need to reach a large number of people via channels outside the copyright driven media (and we have that now—twitter!)
2. You need research and data that shows how bad these things are (and we have that now—the China miracle; the open source revolution; the research revolution powered by scihub; the horrific track record of patents in medicine)
3. You need to start effectively marketing to the people and change the perception of these laws. Someone on HN brought up the term "Imaginary Property" as an alternative to "Intellectual Property". I think it's catchy and will grow.
My estimate is abolishing copyright and patents would be worth $100,000+'s for every person in America. I think it would be the single best thing we could do for our educational, healthcare, and media systems. I think the time has finally come when we can start spreading the word.
So, literally, the school must license the whole book for each potential copy they would make - a year in advance. And that is such a drain on finances for the education sector (which is so underfunded even without that new problem), it's absurd.
We as a society artificially dumb our children down. And for what? That the author doesn't get anything for it anyways?
For surplus value. It is the capitalist class that is dumbing down our children. I absolutely agree with your argument, but disagree that the working class have chosen to do this. It's the bourgeois class; what Professor Jakob Rigi calls: 'knowledge capitalists'. It is the capitalist system that is continuing to plunder the commons, and unfortunately capitalist enclosure is nothing new. Hopefully we can continue to organize to help make people aware of the contradictions of capitalism, in order to change our production system.
"Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists. Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon. The sea pirates take away by force others` properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge [by the capitalists] is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology. In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following. First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other. Second, “pirate” activists, so-called crackers, illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books. These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting.
By refusing to pay and using and distributing the product at will the “digital pirate” questions the moral validity of intellectual property. Although rebelious in terms of violating capitalist intellectal property, digital piracy does not touch the capitalist foundation of the production of knowledge. It merely remains a struggle in the realm of distribution. However, it is a very important form of struggle. It contributes to the formation of a new emerging politico-cultural subjectivity of the netizen. It might be true that most “digital pirates” copy items for personal use, however, the involvement of activists such as Swartz and recent coordinated protests against SOPA and ACTA are the signs and components of a global political resistance, in making, against rent-tribute extracting information capitalism." [1]
[1] https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146
Academic work usually doesn't have a long shelf-life. Textbooks already get replaced every few years. So there's little incentive against advocating for shorter copyright terms that would allow most academics free access to older research materials without impacting their own income.
Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.
This will change. I believe our current cultural continuity reaches all the way back to the end of the Second World War, and that this continuity is a stretching window not a sliding window.
When works from 1945+ start to enter the public domain I think the public at large will recognize these as part of their own cultural continuity and start to appreciate the value of the public domain.
They're the tunes that grandma remembers listening to in her childhood.
In 30 years, grandma will be dead, and the cultural heritage will be the tunes mom remembers listening to in her childhood.
One of the main arguments for the Sony Bono Act of 1998 was: [1]
> The term extension was supported for two key reasons. First, "copyright industries give us [(the United States)] one of our most significant trade surpluses." Second, the recently enacted legislation in the European Union had extended copyright there for 20 years, and so EU works would be protected for 20 years longer than US works if the US did not enact similar term extensions. Howard Coble also stated that it was good for consumers since "When works are protected by copyright, they attract investors who can exploit the work for profit."
> The term extension portion was supported by Songwriters Guild of America, National Academy of Songwriters, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, National Music Publishers Association, the Information Technology Association of America and others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The E.U. extension pertained to recordings of performances and was meant to harmonize with the copyright terms of authors for whom a copyright term of 70 years already applied.
Moreover, copyright protection in the E.U. doesn't take the "date of publication" as starting point, but the year of death of the author. It means that in the E.U., to this day, works - works of art, music, photographs, posters, postcards,... - made in the 19th century can still be protected if the author passed after 1950. It also means that clearing copyright in the E.U. is a huge obstacle for archives and libraries when when it comes to opening up their collections.
The main incentives for copyright protection are economic and geostrategic. Paradoxically, in a global, digitized world, copyright protections have gained even more strategic value in trade agreements.
But even during lifetime 20 or 30 years would be more reasonable. As much as I sympathize with people who make substantial money off a Christmas song they wrote 40 years ago, the idea of lifelong support already seems a bit exaggerated.
You want works to outlast a person in the pathological (edge) case, which the old law supported because, if you’re an author and you release your most recent work a year before you die, you want the spouse you leave behind to profit despite your absence.
Imagine being a sick old man that wants to write one last book and some carnivorous movie company refuses to pay you for the movie rights because you’re about to die anyway. That’s not really protecting the author as copyright is intended.
The often-used "incentivize innovation" argument can be flipped as well. The luxurious length of time may make our most creative people lazy and thus disincentivizes innovation in the same way that giving a worker, say, 10 million dollars will make them no longer show up for work.
However, under the rule of the shorter term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term), the US would be allowed to reduce Ed Sheeran's copyright to 50 years.
The answer is if you cannot understand why something like this happened, then most likely it means money changed hands. There is a strong lobby that is milking the copyright situation and what it is to them to pay some underpaid career politicians to ensure the status quo or even squeeze it a bit more?
I think we shouldn't have copyright enshrined in law and just use 2 parties contract to prevent copies (eg. I purchased/accessed this from you, I promise I won't copy or you can sue me in a private court). Sure, it's not the same level of protection but copyright is proportionally useful to how useful / how much money you can make.
By doing this, you're giving freedom to experiment to everyone, remove legal friction in society and successful products (which are more likely to attract clones and piracy) will have a bit less revenue. Not a bad deal in my book.
Interestingly, in recent years it gets more and more broadly applied, for example to database listing schools and to aerial imagery taken on a government contracts.
What is quite nice if you want to use them for example as a source for OpenStreetMap edits.
While this issue persists mostly for old copyrighted staff, a lot of newly created Public Domain works could be grabbed from OpenClipArt.org, OpenGameArt.org and similar sites.