Re: The Eric Eldred Act

At 02:44 AM 1/30/2003 Thursday, Linda Gruber wrote:
>Hello Eric
>Having seen the effect of rampant copying and distribution on the music
>industry

Is there a quantitative or definitive description of this effect? The only things I've seen claim that every single download of a song is the actual loss of a sale. That is so ludicrous. The opposite is almost always true. I'm pretty old, I've been in the computer business for a very long time, and I've seen this claim/fear many times before. Sport team owners were convinced that televising games would surely keep people from buying tickets, interactive computing would be the end of the Computer Center, the VCR would be the end of movies and television, etc., etc. Sure, CD sales are down in the last couple of years. So is the whole danged economy! We're in a recession for heaven's sake.

>and the effect of competition from too much royalty free stock art
>and works of old masters on the illustration industry, I don't think
>introducing
>more works into public domain promotes progress enough to offset the
>depressing effect that releasing a flood of republished works has on original
>creations and emerging markets in the digital age. Howeever, since you asked
>for opinions, I'd like to suggest a carrot instead of a stick.
>
>If your goal is to nudge languishing copyrighted works into the public domain
>sooner, why not petition Congress to offer a tax incentive for donating
>works
>that copyright holders don't plan to exploit themselves rather than
>thinking of
>ways to unfairly push creators into giving up copyrights. Creators' heirs
>already
>give more than other citizens. Who else in our capitalistic society is
>forced to
>give up valuable holdings to the public domain without any compensation for
>the loss of income their unique property can potentially produce?

Patent owners? Received on Fri Jan 31 2003 - 13:05:17 GMT