Re: thought for the week

On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Greg Ikonen <gikonen[_at_]venlaw.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Timothy Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
> >
> > A world of copyright is like a world in which,
> > when I buy a tomato, I may eat the tomato, but
> > I may not plant its seeds and grow my own tomatoes
> > for market."
>
> This thought ignores a key distinction between copyrighted works and
> tomatoes: someone's creativity and effort went into the creation of
> the copyrighted work; tomatoes are a gift from the Creator.

So were the works created by the authors. Long time ago, religious people believed that their books, songs, paintings, sermons, and many other creative works are a gift from the Creator and therefore, it was wrong to copyright their works for their works were to be available freely to all other people (because they received the knowledge from the Creator freely). However, during the many years later, the greed and the desire to control others' communication crept slowly into the domain of religion. Now, we never thought that our works are a gift from the Creator.

> With the exception of the copyleft folks, most people acknowledge that
> a copyright protection regime encourages creative efforts, and that
> the promotion of these efforts is a good thing for society.

I could not characterize it as a good thing. Copyright is a little evil. People are unbelievably selfish. They won't show their works and inventions to the society unless they get something. Therefore, our society have to bribe the authors to show their works. In return for showing their works, we give them a monopoly over their works which is called as copyright.

> There is -- and should be -- considerable debate over the scope and
> extent of copyright protection, including the troublesome increases
> in the length of copyright protection, and the fair use defense (which
> has been the subject of considerable debate of late). But the belief
> that we'd all be better off without copyright ignores the economic
> reality that copyright protection encourages investment in, and
> development of, creative works.

This is pragmatically true in this capitalistic system (unfortunately).

> The incredible investment in Internet software applications, movies
> and music would, IMO, be decimated without a healthy copyright
> protection regime.

Regarding Internet, you probably have forgotten that the bedrock of Internet was created by the military and that bedrock is 100% public domain. Movies and music are likewise built on the foundation of 100% public domain knowledge. But, as I mentioned above about selfishness, people want to take from the public domain materials but they don't want the term of their copyright to expire. It is like wanting to have a cake and eat it. This makes copyright ugly.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> Received on Sat Jul 24 1999 - 00:11:22 GMT