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Comment by interroboink | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was a decent debate on the subject: "Abolish Copyrights and Patents? A Soho Forum Debate" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep2-ohgFOys)

One thing that struck me was that both sides in that debate agreed that the current copyright/patent system was not in very good shape. That's one nuance that I think can get lost in these discussions — somebody says "copyright can be good" and is met with the retort "look at how bad our system is right now" without allowing for the possibility that we could have a better system, rather than outright abolishing it.

Anyway, I think there are good points on both sides; you seem to be more on the absolutist side (fair enough), but you might enjoy watching it.

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Thanks for sharing this, will definitely give it look.

I get that my position here is considered extreme, but then again the nuanced one is much harder to express in a couple of sentences.

A lifetime of being denied access to science or art on the grounds of copyright has made me cynical.

To me it's just a classist defense barrier - keep the lower class from getting education and art to keep the class system intact. Copyright is just one method that has been corrupted to this purpose.

I'd rather reform than absolution.

Separate corporate owned copyright and personal copyright. Personal has 14 years with option to pay to extend twice (7 years each time manually). Corp starts at 7 years with option to extend like personal.

Little guy has time enough to profit, corp had more budget for advertising than personal so needs less time for profit. Everyone else can enjoy within a reasonable time.

Sure, I suppose this is worth downvoting?

> A lifetime of being denied access to science or art on the grounds of copyright has made me cynical.

What do you mean by this? People have better access to information now via the internet more than ever. In theory the absolute access could still be low, but the outcomes from online learning from free sources are very impressive. People can train themselves for free and make a ton of money from it.

By pointing to the current system they are addressing the possibility that there could be a better system. We had a better system that was perverted into what we have today. A new system would have the same problem and it is much easier to pervert an existing law than to introduce a new law. No abolishing it has a better chance of killing it going forward instead of keeping the vector for that type of control alive.

> By pointing to the current system they are addressing the possibility that there could be a better system.

I think a big problem with the current system, is that (on the whole) it adopts fundamentally the same rules for completely different categories of things – such as novels and computer software.

The term of "life of author plus 70 years" was justified with reference to authors of literature, music, etc. Whether or not it is justified in that context, that was the context used to justify it. It is very questionable whether it makes sense when applied to software.

A good place to start might be with changing the rules just for software. I'd say a reasonable copyright term for software should be a small number of decades (10 or 20 or 30). Source code escrow should be mandatory, with the escrowed source code being automatically released to the public upon copyright expiration. Publication of the source code should be allowed as an alternative to escrow, so open source projects aren't burdened with it.

> No abolishing it has a better chance of killing it going forward

Radical proposals rarely succeed. Proposals for incremental reforms face an uphill battle against powerful vested interests, but the odds against radical proposals are a lot higher.

No one thinks the system is perfect. What I don't understand is why there is an expectation that it should be perfect. We don't expect criminal law to be perfect, why is it that we expect perfection here? I'm not saying we shouldn't improve, but I think this flows from what you are saying.

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