The copyright industry should brace itself: the Kim Dotcom saga isn't over

I welcome it. The current ad-based economic system is a "stalker economy" that carries an enormous hidden cost that all of society ends up bearing (loss of privacy leads to losses of creativity and stagnation of political reform). The sooner we get the ad middle-men out of the loop, the sooner we can start building services with customers who are people, not corporate advertising budgets.

I have to disagree 100%. Once you publish something you lose all effective control over it.

It is only this legal fiction we call copyright that gives copyright owners any sort of control. But even maximalist copyright regimes are full of more holes than swiss cheese - if anything, the more they ratchet up the controls the more people seek out the holes. It is human nature to share knowledge, modern copyright is about fighting human nature and that never works out (c.f. the war on drugs).

You want to get paid, and you want the governments help to do so. Fine. Make a compromise that benefit both side and do no harm to groups we don't expect to be working at any rate. It should not be such a hard thing.

Previously you've argued that the copyright industry actually has the stronger set of morals, and those violating copyright are somehow the "bad guys" in this debate.

Now you're arguing that society is warped and all content is trash ("a Miley Cyrus").

I may be trying to accomplish the impossible by being rational here, but level with me. Why the love for copyright?

I admit that copyright may have a useful purpose. I feel like the usefulness expires about 10 years after the work has been created.

I feel strongly that the current laws and the corporations who largely depend on those laws to make a profit represent a parasite that exploits 12 year olds and other underprivileged people.

You do wonderful analysis of cryptosystems. This isn't much different, right? It can be deconstructed analytically, the problem identified, and at least on a message board the propaganda can be debunked. ("You wouldn't steal a car. Stealing is wrong." Copyright violation IS NOT stealing.)

"Charging money for a Miley Cyrus track" is "giving the producers of that content a livelihood". Strict copyright enforcement, especially for digital "intellectual property" is where the warping comes in, especially for very long (infinite?) copyright terms. Also, since the enforcement is done by the state, the cost of strict enforcement takes away from other things the state could do, the "Opportunity Cost", I believe.

Strict enforcement of copyright is going to involve a lot of stuff, beginning with prohibiting open source operating systems. Are you willing to accept that? Why should I be willing to accept that?

Similarly, copyrights are discouraging authorship as well as encouraging it, and empirical evidence suggests the former factor may very well be stronger than the latter. So we might be paying the huge price of copyright restrictions for negative benefits.

> No, it only bans unlicensed derivative work

Requiring a license negotiation is a barrier so large, that it prevents virtually all derivative works. Most authors do not license any derivative works. Many creators of derivative works do not do so for a profit incentive. The cost of a license deal will often overwhelm the cost of creating the work itself.

In short, copyrights outright ban the vast majority of derivative works.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but historically works got funded was through the means of patronship or commissions from rich people. Not a terribly scalable process

Not only patronship. British authors did not enjoy copyrights in the early US, so they had struck deals with publishers for right to be the first to publish. They often made more money from these deals than from their copyright-based publishing.

Contemporary authorship of much software is funded without being based on copyrights (A lot of open-source companies).

Other contemporary authorship is funded by academia, and does not depend on copyrights.

The "9/11 commission report" was published without copyrights, and yet the publisher had profited at least millions of dollars from its publication.

> Yes, we apply artificial scarcity to copies because authorship is scarce. But that's the best way we know how -- that's how economics has always worked

Economics had always worked on reducing scarcity, not increasing it.

> But until we've figured out a better way we should not just abandon a model that's worked pretty well so far.

There's no reason at all to believe this system works well, as the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Consider that if today's copyright laws had existed in the time of Shakespeare, he would not be allowed to author his works without "licensing deals".

If we look at patents. It's working horribly. Literally millions of people are dying of curable diseases. 90% of drug funding comes from government, of which 85% goes to the pockets of the drug firms, and only 15% funds actual research!

If Disney and friends can change the deal to suit themselves, why shouldn't every consumer follow suit and make similar self-benefiting changes to the copyright deal and copy/consume Disney material without paying?

If you buy them on DVD or Blu-ray you will be bombarded by advertisements, and they were probably unskippable until Disney added a skip button and called it an invention (AKA "Disney Fast Play").

No advertising, no privacy-destroying user tracking, just cash in trade for a product.

If only that were the case. Does iTunes state in its privacy policy or EULA that purchase and playback tracking data is not recorded or reported to content producers? What about consumer devices (connected Blu-ray players, smart TVs, etc.) that report back to their masters like the recently discovered LG smart TVs?

Society grants IP rights as an exchange. Exclusive access granted for a period of time to allow people to profit from their work - then it goes public domain so that society is enriched in turn.