This seems like the opposite of the intent of copyright? How could the intent of granting an artificial monopoly to one party on disseminating information be to provide equal access to knowledge?
There are a few people who might write a book and give it away for free, but if you want professional artists you need to ensure that they can make money by selling copies. In other words, someone like the Internet Archive won't start giving it away for free.
In any case, calling it a "monopoly" is a bit unfair. It's like saying the rape laws give a woman a "monopoly" on her body. No one is stopped from creating their own art, just from plagiarizing others.
The notion was that instead of having authors jealously and exclusively guarding their works, they can copyright them and get a period of guaranteed income. After that period lapses, the works enter the public domain which enriches the general public.
That reduces the risk of important works being lost.
Without the copyrights, you could imagine private libraries popping up and works only accessible via strict security.
I don't really have to imagine it. That seems exactly like every company that has an internal wiki or something similar.
Noted on the original point though. That just seems like such a foreign problem from todays environment with how readily people share information. I think it is more due to ease than the right to an artificial monopoly that people share so much information now though.
Totally agree. It solved a very different problem than what we have today and even runs counter to the original intent because of how much the terms have been expanded.
Now, we have things like scientific publishers who jealously lock up papers behind expensive paywalls and use copyright as a kludge to keep those papers from ever seeing the general public. What's worse, because everything is digital it's entirely feasible that these papers will all be lost to time if one of these companies goes out of business.
It really is high time we revisit what copyrights are doing vs what they were intended to do. I'm not opposed to keeping them around, but at very least we should change the time they apply to something far more reasonable. Heck, even when copyright is applicable should be bound to whether or not the work has been submitted to a national archiving service. Not submitted to the archiving service, no copyright applies.
> The Congress shall have Power…
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; …
Copyright is a means to an end. The end must be to promote the progress of science and useful arts for Congress to have the power to create such monopolies.