 funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5
2 edits | What is Up is Down, and Left is Right COPYRIGHT = THE RIGHT TO COPY!
After 200 years of church and crown censorship and monopoly, a reform "...An Act for the Encouragement of Learning..." known as the Statute of Anne (1710) established the right for the public to resell their purchased printed works after first sale, gave the right to anyone to be an author and publish their own work, and put almost everything else into the public domain (public can copy, distribute, share, anything).
The exception was the first 14 years (perhaps 28 if renewed), during which only the author could copy/distribute. This limited time was to encourage authors to keep creating new works.
For the first time in over a century, authors could self-publish instead of being paid whatever the monopolist wanted to pay. Buyers were free to sell the copies they purchased during this time.
The idea here wasn't to prohibit copying, it was to encourage it! This was a COPY RIGHT. The Stationers' Company monopoly had become a closed and censored market both to authors and to distributors (sound familiar?) so the solution -- as were many reforms -- was to blow it wide open.
COPYRIGHT IS a public right to publish, to resell, and after a brief while, to copy and distribute. It's not supposed to last a lifetime.
The law has become corrupted. It needs to be blown open again. I don't even listen to this stuff, I shouldn't have to pay a tax so high as I would pay if I willingly subscribed to a service. But on the other hand, we're a better society with art and culture -- so creating a system that supports them all generally has some rational sensibility. That's not an Internet benefit, that's a societal one.
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Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
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