Trotter Hardy writes:
>
> . . . . When only publishers published,
> they learned that they had to think about copyright. When everybody
> becomes a publisher, they all have to learn to think about copyright.
> Being told that one is affecting copyright in one's day-to-day life
> is indeed a great surprise to many, and it's certainly something new.
> But that's not copyright's fault.
Ah, but I think that it is, at least in part. Copyright laws, at least in the U.S., were not written to be understood and followed by "everybody" -- they're way too complicated. As currently written, they seem designed to be followed by those who have copyright lawyers, and essentially ignored by those who don't. That's pretty much what happens today. If a law contains (as the US law does in section 112) a long, specific and detailed provision permitting "transmitting organization[s]," "government bod[ies] or other nonprofit organization" to make numerous ephemeral reproductions without the copyright owner's permission, and to keep them around for as long, in some cases, as seven years, but the law contains no apparent privilege beyond fair use for ordinary mortals to make ephemeral copies in computer memory and keep them around for a matter of moments, reasonable people not acquainted with the fact that the copyright statute is not a very reasonable law might well conclude that the law can't be meant to cover their private, noncommercial use.
I don't read any of the postings in this thread to be asserting that the concept of giving creators some measure of control over the works they create in order to supply incentives for creation and dissemination is obsolete; rather, people have argued that the way we have gone about setting up that incentive system, as embodied in our copyright law, is obsolete. Most particularly, people have been writing, it no longer makes a great deal of sense to design that incentive system around a law that gives authors and publishers control over the making of reproductions. And there, I'd suggest, the number of directions that observation has come from indicate that perhaps we had all better pay it careful attention.
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